Beautiful. Violent. American. The N.F.L. at 100.

The league has never stopped tinkering with its rules, almost always with the goal of encouraging more offense, more passing. Forty-five years ago, only one quarterback in the league averaged more than 200 passing yards a game. This year, 30 quarterbacks do.

Some of these changes have arguably been introduced out of necessity. Higher-scoring games draw better TV ratings, so ball carriers and throwers must be protected from brutal tackles. Fans express outrage about the threat of brain damage to their heroes, so there must be at least a feigned effort at reducing hits. (Where the league once celebrated violence, it now plays it down.) And as fans’ attention spans get shorter, the RedZone channel allows viewers to jump from game to game, depending on where there’s action, in an endlessly updated highlight reel that circumvents one of football’s biggest weaknesses: lots of dead time.

Of course, it’s impossible these days to treat the N.F.L. as simple entertainment. Watching football is necessarily an exercise in cognitive dissonance: Enjoying a game requires us, on some level, to ignore everything we know about brain injuries, the shortness of most players’ careers and the physical toll the game takes on their bodies, the team owners’ intolerance for some social commentary and the disregard for domestic and sexual assaults.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/sports/football/nfl-100-violence-american-culture.html?emc=rss&partner=rss