No doubt that the NFL is a fantastic spectacle, the most entertaining sports league in the world, to my eyes. But in terms of providing an optimal forum for competition, it has two serious flaws.
One is injuries. They can and do have an outsized impact on a game, season, and even a franchise’s overall direction. The human toll in pain and suffering aside, the broad and random “injury bug” is a huge factor that detracts from the game. Of course, they are inevitable to some degree and even inherent in the nature of the sport. I’m not proposing solutions. I’m just saying that to the extent that injuries become the prevailing storyline, it detracts from the enjoyment of the sport.
The second flaw is perhaps more manageable. It is the officiating. You need look no farther back than the most recent Super Bowl for a glimpse of the problem. Again, this is a multi-faceted issue. There’s the complexity of the game. There’s the degree of discretion granted to the officials. And there is what I consider an unconscious bias in favor of the “good” teams and the home teams.
There are so many ways that officials affect the game that I had never really considered, for example, the possibility of a systematic bias in the spotting of the ball. But this brief yet persuasive analysis of short-yardage plays provides just one example of an apparent home-team bias.
