The 266-pound quarterback fakes a handoff to the 280-pound fullback and throws a pass to the 6-foot-4-inch receiver who runs the 40-yard dash in 4.2 seconds.
This is pro football in the future, and the future is here. The Minnesota Vikings will line up Sunday against the Bears with 6-4, 266-pound Daunte Culpepper at quarterback, 280-pound Jim Kleinsasser at fullback, and Randy Moss, the fastest tall receiver in history.
The days of 400-pound linemen are close. Detroit Lions tackle Aaron Gibson admits to 380.
Increased size, strength and speed are constants in the evolution of pro football. There is no end in sight, and the NFL Players Association president, Miami Dolphins defensive end Trace Armstrong, thinks the gains will be natural, without chemical aid.
“You’ve got to be a whiz-bang scientist to get past all the stuff we’ve got to do now,” Armstrong said of the league’s drug-testing protocol.
Besides, in their efforts to enhance their celebrity, players sacrifice privacy. If Web cams can pry into the homes of players for the 24-hour entertainment of fans, medicine cabinets will become public property. With a camera and an active chat room on the Internet, Bears quarterback Jim Miller couldn’t have walked into that nutrition store alone and inadvertently bought illegal supplements. Too many fans would have beeped his pager or rung his cell phone with a warning. With new or renovated stadiums in 22 of the league’s 31 venues, the NFL knows where it will play in the first half of the 21st Century. The trend is single-purpose stadiums subsidized by private money, catering to fans who can afford luxury seats. Stadium “smart seats” will allow for the interactive pleasure of fans wanting to call up information rather than read programs.
“Fans are demanding more information and we have to be responsive,” said Roger Goodell, the NFL’s executive vice president of business, properties and club services. “We have to provide more information at the stadium or it is another disincentive to go to the stadium.
“That is a very big challenge for the NFL to make sure fans can get the same information if not more when they go to the stadium as they can sitting at home watching on TV.”
With giant-screen home theaters and Surroundsound, fans at home already feel as if they are attending the games in person. The idea is to make fans attending the games feel like they are sitting in the comfort of their living rooms.
“We want all the facilities to be sold out,” Goodell said. “When you turn on the TV and see a stadium filled with fans, the excitement comes through the broadcast.”
The continued marriage of football and technology is vital. Once the excitement wanes and boredom reigns, the show is over. It was never-boring Mike Ditka who once mused about the future of the game he loves:
“The thing we have to remember is the consumer is paying for all this. Someday someone is going to say, `You know, that’s a beautiful lake out there. I could go buy a boat and go out on that lake all afternoon on Sunday and I could have enough money to pay for it with the money I save on football tickets.’
“Nobody said that football is the end-all of the world, that it has to be here forever.”
THE GAME
The game will remain remarkably consistent. If changes allow it to evolve into an unrecognizable adaptation, fans of different eras will no longer be able to compare and argue. If rules favoring passing eventually eliminate running, for example, Ultimate Frisbee could challenge for popularity.
“In the last 100 years, what did keep us was the game,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney. “The game is great. Right now all the emphasis is on bigness, the money, how much a franchise costs, how much players are making. I’m not saying that’s bad. But just because the networks pay us a lot of money, we cannot be doing things that will affect the game. I can see we get so possessed with ratings that the networks start pressuring us that we have to do this and that.”
Some owners are so concerned with decorum they outlawed the “Bob ‘N’ Weave” end-zone celebration of the world champion St. Louis Rams this season, drawing criticism for dictating a “No Fun League.” There is a fine line between competitive sportsmanship and commercial entertainment that must be monitored constantly.
The new XFL, a brainstorm of the World Wrestling Federation that begins play next winter, promises a more exciting product than the NFL. At the same time, the XFL promises a credible version of football in contrast to its successful mockery of wrestling.
“I think we have a good game,” said George Young, NFL vice president of football operations. “I don’t think we should make major changes unless statistics show we have to. When we don’t have a good balance between offense and defense, we make a rule change. A lot of times they are not major.”
Tampa Bay General Manager Rich McKay, co-chairman of the NFL Competition Committee that studies rules changes, said:
“The game itself will always change and has changed a lot. But amazingly, it hasn’t changed as much as people think. If you saw a game that was constantly trying to reinvent itself and trying to become more popular, I’d be more fearful of the future.”
THE STADIUMS
Already Super Bowl sites have experimented with seats wired for the interactive entertainment of fans, who can use personal computers to pull up information. Already, hard-wiring is obsolete. Palm Pilots and cell phones will allow fans to access everything from instant replay to distant replay. Just how great was that catch by Marcus Robinson? Between plays, compare it with other great catches by other receivers on other teams in other eras. Scoreboards give fans as much to watch, including commercials, as fans see sitting at home.
“You can’t leave people in the dark,” Goodell said.
To encourage fans to continue to come to stadiums, teams will offer extras. Only from the stadium might a fan plug into a huddle or wear a virtual-reality helmet hooked directly into the mind of Curtis Enis as he runs off tackle.
Ideal indoor playing conditions will include real grass.
“I think artificial surfaces may leave the game,” said Minnesota Vikings coach Dennis Green, co-chairman of the NFL Competition Committee. “[And] grass fields might slow down the game a little bit.”
As the sterile indoor environments become too predictable, teams will agree to open their retractable roofs some Decembers to provide fans warm and fuzzy memories of cold and snowy days.
THE FAN
First the fans will either have to be richer or pretend to be richer. Already NFL teams are making fans buy personal seat licenses, which give fans the right to buy a ticket. The PSLs pay for the stadiums. Luxury boxes provide income that owners aren’t required to share with fellow owners. The owners argue they must use this income to pay players.
So long as fans remain as naively loyal to hometown teams as they were in the last century, convinced they are contributing to civic pride and welfare, NFL owners have no worries.
When 35-year-old Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder became the first to charge admission for fans to attend training-camp practices, he had to be encouraged by the first fan in line, who said paying to park and watch was “the least” he could do to help Snyder pay big signing bonuses to players.
So long as fans believe they are being entertained more than exploited, the NFL will endure.
THE TELECAST
It is only unsubstantiated legend that the rectangular shape of a television screen was invented to fit the rectangular shape of a football field. That both match the rectangular shape of a dollar bill also is mere coincidence.
The future of big-money football depends on big-money television, and probably vice versa, such is the symbiotic relationship. Because polls have shown the typical sports fan to be more interested in football year-round than in any other sport, the XFL is co-owned by NBC to fill the winter-spring void. The NFL will add regular-season or playoff games–or both–to stretch the schedule. The Super Bowl soon will be pushed back to a permanent February date. In addition, the NFL has endorsed springtime football through NFL Europe and its support of the Arena Football League.
Pay TV? What do you think you are already doing? Although the NFL is the only sports league to televise every game, the lines between over-the-air and cable telecasts become blurred. There are owners who see a bonanza in a pay-TV Super Bowl that would dwarf the take from a pay-TV heavyweight championship fight.
Fans will be able to direct their own telecasts by choosing different camera angles with a press of their remote. If they want to concentrate on line play or on a favorite player, there will be cameras to accommodate. Every player, coach and official will be fitted with a helmet or hat cam so you can experience every collision just like NASCAR fans.
“High-definition TV now is like sitting in a press box without the glass,” said John Filippelli, ABC vice president of production. “If you can imagine it, it can get done.”
Radio? What’s that? Gone the way of the old TV screen, which is now your computer, still rectangular.
THE PLAYER
With machinery capable of digging ditches and mining coal, playing football is among the last hard-labor vocations. Sweat is becoming so rare it is used as a marketing prop by Gatorade. The football player becomes society’s last warrior.
He is a celebrity warrior, an amalgamation of rock star/actor/athlete. His face covered by a helmet, he can remain reclusive and mysterious, or he can work overtime at self-promotion with personal Web sites and Web cams.
“We’ve maintained labor peace longer than any other sport,” said Armstrong, president of the NFLPA. “I think that’s where baseball lost some of their luster, because of ugly public battles. We’re here for the fans and we’ve always got to work at ways we can interact with them.”
Players are bigger, stronger, faster, but are there enough of them? As more schools abandon costly and dangerous football programs, the NFL has stepped up efforts to cultivate interest.
“There are fewer young people playing, but it’s still a fabric of college life,” Green said. “As long as colleges are our farm system, we’re OK. If not we would just go to a real farm system, like baseball.”
Armstrong sees no danger of a dwindling talent pool.
“People still have passion for [football],” Armstrong said. “As long as they play games on Friday nights and people come out and watch and cheer, kids are going to want to go out and be on the field.”
Young, the former general manager of the New York Giants, calls it “a major concern of ours. We have to keep more young people interested in playing. A lot of it is safety.”
The game’s violence remains a major part of football’s appeal.
“We want it to be a spartan-like game,” Young said. “As long as we have people who think courage and toughness and strength and good conditioning and competition are all good things, I think football will appeal. I don’t think young people are always looking for the easy way. One of the benefits of our sport is it is not an easy sport. It takes hard work, teamwork, self-discipline, team discipline, and they’re all great features we have to teach.”
Armstrong predicts increased specialization. Most teams rarely field the same 11 players for consecutive downs. The only trend that will limit specialization is roster size, and rosters are dictated by minimum salaries and salary caps.
The undisciplined athlete will become obsolete. Not only will teams refuse to coddle troublemakers, the sport will become so competitive and demanding that football players won’t have any more time or energy to get into scrapes with the law than synchronized swimmers do.
THE COACH
“The key will always be the same at every level: If we have good coaches, we’ll have good football players,” Young said.
How will the role of coaches change?
“I don’t see it changing,” Green said. “It hasn’t changed much for 20 years.”
And what is that role?
“To get men to do what they don’t want to do in order to accomplish what they want to accomplish,” said the late Tom Landry.
“Computers will be much more at play as far as tendencies,” Green said. “Staffs will be bigger.”
Indeed, the Denver Broncos already have a “pass-rush specialist” coach in addition to a defensive line coach. They have a “nickel package” coach.
Nothing in the salary-cap rules can keep an owner from hiring one coach per player to serve as individual mentor, counselor, guardian, bodyguard, valet, trainer and chauffeur.
Since free-agent player movement is here to stay, owners might decide that stability in coaching is a hedge against chaos.
“Successful coaches will be the guys who can adapt and work new people into their system very quickly,” Tampa Bay coach Tony Dungy said.
Miami coach Dave Wannstedt thinks union rules will prevent coaches from having the kind of year-round access to players necessary as more players change teams.
“It’s only a matter of time before we open training camp and they say, `No pads the first week,’ just like college,” Wannstedt said.
THE TECHNOLOGY
Armstrong is one of a handful of NFL players who wears a special helmet, lighter than the more popular model. In the future, better protective gear might be the only innovation that protects the game from protective mothers.
“John Andretti can hit a wall at Texas Motor Speedway at 200 m.p.h. and you see him get thrown all around the inside of a car and he gets out and walks away,” Armstrong said. “We get a guy who falls down and bumps his head on the turf and he can’t spell his name backward. How hard is it to improve a 25-year-old design?”
If golf clubs can get lighter and stronger and more flexible all at the same time, why can’t shoulder pads and knee braces?
If the quarterback already wears a headset to hear plays from the coach, why have huddles? Give everybody an earphone. And why turn them off after the play is called? “Go long. Stop. Turn around. Watch out. Block that guy. Check out the one in shorts in the third row.”
If fans can be Monday morning quarterbacks, why not Sunday afternoon? A coach can’t decide whether to go for it or kick. He polls the audience. The verdict is instantly flashed on the scoreboard.
Players who communicate by personal Web sites won’t have to wait until after the game. Tune in to your favorite player’s thoughts as he breaks the huddle. Rent virtual-reality goggles and feel the force of Brian Urlacher’s tackles.
THE OWNER
Who owns and why? Rich people for fun and profit, not necessarily in that order. Nothing much changes, except the rich people will no longer have any connection to the family-owned franchises with deep league roots–the Rooneys, the McCaskeys, the Maras. Those heirs no longer will be able to resist selling to tycoons who write billion-dollar checks.
“I’m not for corporate ownership,” Rooney said. “It creates other problems. If USX owns the Steelers, stockholders are going to be looking for dividends and complaining about losing money. And when you dump money into an operation, it creates an imbalance in the competition.”
Owners skirt the corporate issue by selling everything else. It’s only a matter of time before uniforms look like the human billboards worn by race drivers.
“We’re one of the Nike teams and it’s been good,” Rooney said. “But they come in every now and then and say, `We’d like to do something with the uniforms.’ I say, `The uniforms are untouchable. Whatever you do on the sidelines, I’ll listen. But the uniform is sacred.'”
THE LEAGUE
How many teams? Divisions? Countries?
“I think we’re about maxed,” said Rick Spielman, former Bears pro personnel director now at Miami. “The more they expand, the quality of the game will go down.”
Commissioner Paul Tagliabue says he expects no more than 32 teams in his lifetime. The 32nd, the Houston Texans will take the field in 2002.
A team will move to Los Angeles. Again. In fact, several teams will try Los Angeles as the century progresses. Toronto and Mexico City are more likely destinations.
“I see the value of NFL Europe as a good marketing tool, but I’m not one to see much of an international game,” McKay said. “I can certainly see us in Canada or Mexico, on our continent.”
The key to widespread acceptance is getting natives to play. There simply aren’t as many potential hulking football players in Asia as there are potential basketball or baseball players.
“My son says we ought to be in South America, even though they have soccer,” Rooney said. “They are interested in Mexico. We have to pick our spots.”
