If It's Not Broke Don't Fix It

I consider myself a sports fan. I'm not a fanatic but I do enjoy watching the best of the best duke it out in competition. I watch Major League Baseball, The College World Series and some of the playoff rounds prior, The National Football League, and college football, The National Hockey League when the playoffs start, World Cup Soccer, The Olympics, and college basketball to name a few.

If you noticed in the above list I didn't mention the National Basketball Association. I confess I can't help myself when they finally make it to the conference finals that I get interested, but I seriously don't watch a game all year long. They have destroyed the game. College basketball is so true to the sport, the NBA is a toned down version of the Globetrotters. I could go into great detail in all of the ways I think they have tarnished their own game but I authored a very lengthy piece in my last effort and I'm on a quest to keep this concise. The NBA, in order to give the fans what they want, have really changed the game. As a fan of sport, any sport, I just don't think that's cool.

Major League baseball has tried to do the same: steroids, corked bats, dimension changes at stadiums, juiced balls?, ridiculous strike zones. I suspect because baseball is our first love we don't like it when the tradition is changed too much. Even though these things have, and do, occur, we frown upon them and encourage the game be played the way it was meant to be played. None of us feel good about the home run asterisk era.

Which leads me to the NFL. Dan Marino held the record for the most yards passing in one season with 5,084, set in 1984. He was the first player to throw for over five thousand yards in the history of the game. In 2008 Drew Brees fell just shy, fifteen yards, of breaking Marino's mark. However, he did surpass the 5,000 yard mark and became only the second player in the history of the league to achieve this feat. This year three players eclipsed 5,000 yards: Brady, Stafford, and Brees (again).

I'm cool that sport is entertainment. I'm just not cool when we alter the game to make it more entertaining. The rules have been altered and the referees have been instructed to make the game more offensive oriented. I suppose it is possible three dudes all broke the 5,000 in the same year, when only two guys had ever done it, and it could just be the way it is,but I'm a huge fan of Occam's Razor and that isn't the simplest explanation.