Game changers

There is still a magic to it, when the lights come up on a Friday night. There is still something wondrous about it, something bedrock, something American and permanent.

All those bobbing helmets moving into those circles of light that blossom along city streets and between fields of corn in the middle of nowhere, where you can see 'em for miles. Mom and Dad banging their hands together in the stands. Cheerleaders cheerleading; young boys playing their own games in the shadows behind the bleachers; wise old heads nodding along the fences,  remembering back-in-the-day Friday nights when the football was better, the dew on the grass slicker, the coaches smarter and tougher.

We love football in this country. We love it on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons and Sundays and Mondays. And these days we fear losing it, because if its cost has always been ruinous, it has never been more so now.

Football players have always been willing to sacrifice their bodies to the game, because, yes, we do love it so. But those players are bigger and faster and stronger now, absurdly so, and the game's calculus has tilted as a result. Loving the game, and the pile of money you earn for indulging that love, is no longer enough. All those foot-pounds of force being generated now destroy your quality of life far more completely than they ever have.

In short, it's just not worth it.

 And so more and more players are making what they can and then getting out. Andrew Luck is only the latest player, and so far the most prominent, to weigh that altered calculus and act accordingly. That more will follow his lead is the fear that lay back of the scorn he got from all those wannabe tough guys on the internet.

They're afraid for the game, or at least for the game they know. Which means they no doubt view with alarm what's happening in Hanover, N.H., these days, where Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens is making his own alterations on the game's calculus.

As Hallie Grossman of ESPN chronicles here, six years or so ago Teevens took the radical step of banning player-on-player tackling during practice. This seemed completely Mad Professor-ish at the time, but it has drastically reduced the number of concussions Dartmouth players incur during a given season.

Tackling  in practice now is high tech: The slide rule boys have developed a robotic tackling dummy that actually moves the way flesh-and-blood player would. And the bad news for the old-schoolers and Wannabes is, it hasn't ruined football at Dartmouth; since Teevens instituted the tackle ban, Dartmouth has scarcely missed a beat, winning 76 percent of its games.

So, yes, change is coming, and perhaps radical change. But it has ever been thus. Football in 2019 is not what it was in 1969, and football in 1969 is not what it was in 1929. And on and on, back to its primitive and long-dead origins.

Those stalwart lads from Rutgers and Princeton who played in the first college game 150 years ago, for instance, no doubt sounded exactly like the Wannabes sound now when they banished the flying wedge and introduced the first forward pass. And those players  no doubt sounded the same when the T formation replaced the single wing.

And so on. And so on. And so on.

Broken, Part Deux

Couple more observations about the Retirement Announcement That Shocked The World And Pissed Off Wannabe Tough Guys Everywhere, on the Monday morning of the last week of the NFL preseason ...

* It is, indisputably, the best thing on Twitter. Some genius photoshopped a Civil War uniform onto Andrew Luck and his infamous 19th-century neck beard -- beards were big in the Civil War; you weren't a cool general if you didn't have one (lookin' at you, Joe Hooker) -- and voila, Capt. Andrew Luck was born.

But what happens now to all those poignant letters to Dearest Mother, thanking her for the latest care package of squirrel oil, braised possum thighs and candied gopher knees?

Alas, we may already have the answer. Here's what Capt. Andrew Luck tweeted yesterday:

Dearest mother — The quill has never felt more heavy. I have made the decision to holster my sidearm permanently. I shall battle no more. The decision is difficult, but, as the hogs taught me, I must be true to myself. I am coming home to care for you and the farm. — Andrew

So that's that, I guess. I for one will miss the candied gopher knees. I hear they're yummy.

* Others of note have done what Andrew Luck is doing, for a variety of reasons. Jim Brown left football at 30 to pursue an acting career. The game beat up Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus so bad they left at 29 and 31, respectively. Many, many others followed the same path for the same reason.

But somehow it's different when an Andrew Luck, beat up by the game, too, decides to walk away at 29. Apparently if you do that before football has actually crippled you, it fails to pass muster with the Wannabes, on account of the game pays you a whole lot of money for the privilege of crippling you. So shut up and take it like a man.

Know what else a guy like Andrew Luck deciding the game isn't worth it does?

Sends a shiver through every boardroom in the NFL.

This from Drew Magary of Deadspin: "And while the NFL will handle Luck’s retirement with its usual false graciousness, the collective silent scream of GMs and scouts in the face of a draining talent pool is growing by the second. Luck is the largest domino to fall, by far. If he can walk away from the game (and from untold millions in future earnings in a league in which good QBs play for quite a while) right before the season begins, anyone can. That means, going forward, teams are gonna be too scared shitless to draft ANYONE."

Absolutely spot on. It's one thing for a relative unknown to decide the game isn't worth it and depart in his 20s, as more and more are these days. But when a Calvin Johnson leaves at 30, or an Andrew Luck at 29? And when the latter is so bluntly honest about it, saying he's just tired of being in pain all the time, and what kind of life is that no matter how chunky the paycheck?

Whoa. Katie bar the door. And get ready for even more lunatic psychoanalysis at the NFL combine, as those desperate GMs try to determine who's still batty enough to want to play their game in an era of linebackers and  edge rushers with the speed of Olympic sprinters, delivering foot-pounds of force unimaginable 30 or 40 years ago.

Think you've seen crazy from the combine before?

Just wait.

Broken

They booed him when he walked off his last football field Saturday night, and what a fine thanks for services rendered that was. Andrew Luck left pieces of himself scattered from San Diego to Foxborough for all those jamokes in their throwback Peyton and Marvin and Bob Sanders jerseys, and their gold watch to him was to boo him like he was Deflategate Brady.

"Yeah, it hurt," Luck admitted later, eyes red, tears close, a 29-year-old man in a 55-year-old's body.

Darned right it hurt. But maybe it was affirmation, too, that walking away was the right thing at the right time for a man who always had more going on between his ears than snap counts and checkdowns, and who loved with a child's fervor a game that, in the end, didn't love him back.

Those dillsacks that booed him last night, every one of whom should have been tossed out of the joint like 2 a.m. drunks?

They weren't as hard on Andrew Luck as the game was, ultimately. Or as his own front office was.

It was the latter that most ruined him, of course, by drafting like drunks themselves. With almost unimaginable good fortune, they fell into a generational talent just as the generational talent they already had (Peyton Manning) was making for sunset. Then they put him behind a remainder-bin offensive line that couldn't block sunlight, and broke him the way a careless child breaks a toy.

Luck was hit, and hit, and hit again, even as he led the Colts back to semi-respectability. And the injuries soon followed.

Torn rib cartilage.

Torn abdomen.

Concussion.

Lacerated kidney that left him pissing blood.

The torn labrum in his throwing arm that refused to heal and put him down for the entire 2017 season.

And then ...

And then, the strained calf back in March. More pain. More pain. A month became two became six and still no one, least of all Luck himself, could figure out why he was still in pain, still couldn't move properly in the pocket.

Enough was finally enough.

And, listen, if what happened last night left most of the football world reeling, it was not something that came winging in from the blue. As long ago as 2017, when the shoulder simply wouldn't heal, Luck says he contemplated hanging it up. And he'd been mulling the same thing for two weeks before last night, and the Colts knew it. So he did not just spring this on his employers, and it wasn't a decision he arrived at on the spur of the moment.

In the end, it wasn't even his decision, in a sense. There comes a time when the body simply tells the mind, "No more." And the mind, no matter how sheathed it is in steel, has to go along.

This is what Luck seemed to be describing last night, and to hell with anyone who thinks badly of him for it. The jamokes and the clueless will scoff when Luck talks about how the pain had stolen the joy of the game for him, pointing out that he gets paid absurdly well to do a job and that joy doesn't enter into it.

But it does. And it should.

The money, see, is irrelevant, because playing professional football is a hard dollar no matter how high the dollars are stacked. It's why more and more players are walking away from the game in their 20s, or at the gateway of their 30s. No contract, after all, is juicy enough to give you back what football, by its very nature, takes away.

I have never stood on an NFL sideline during a game. But I have stood on the sideline at Notre Dame Stadium, many times, and I've heard what it sounds like when two high-end college football players collide at full speed.

It sounds like two cars colliding. You can't imagine the violence of it.

And that's not even the NFL, where the violence is ratcheted up even higher.

And so, players get out while the getting's good. And Andrew Luck is getting out while he can still walk, still get down on the floor and play with his kids when they come, go to their ballgames when they get older and remember being there.

Yeah, the timing sucks, if you're a Colts fan. But if you're Colts fan, your opinion matters exactly zero here, because it's not your life.

Or your pain. Or your vanished joy.

Echo of the past

So, you want to know just what a Model T the NFL preseason has become, in the age of the Tesla?

It seems the old grid doesn't have to be ironclad.

Which is to say, Oakland and Green Bay played a preseason game up in Winnipeg last night, but did so on an 80-yard field. They put the goal line at the respective 10-yard lines, because the gridiron in Winnipeg was set to CFL dimensions, which means the goalposts were on the goal lines. So they had to move the goalposts back, which left a couple of holes in the turf where they'd been anchored.

A patch job was deemed insufficient by Packers coach Matt LaFleur. And so ...

And so, they improvised. Which of course would never happen in an actual game.

That it happened last night is a tacit admission that even the NFL doesn't think preseason games are worth a bucket of warm spit. Most of what they traditionally have been about -- evaluating rookies and end-of-benchers in order to set your roster -- seems superfluous in the age of the combine and individual workout, where every aspect of every potential draft pick is scrutinized to the point of absurdity.

Used to be training camp lasted five, six weeks, and its primary goal was to whip the lads into shape after an offseason of sitting on their assets. You needed preseason games then, just so the players could get their football legs back. They needed to hit, and be hit, in a time when the only thing they'd been hitting for six months was the all-you-can-eat-buffet at the local Stuff Yer Face Here.

Not so much now.

Now training camp lasts two weeks, because the players have already gone through mini-camps and OTAs and mini-OTA camps. And in most cases have been working out individually in the interim.

Hall of Fame defensive back Rod Woodson once told me he took all of about two weeks off at the end of every season. Then it was back to his workout-and-diet regimen. It was one of the reasons he was famously regarded as the fittest player in the NFL -- and he needed to be, because to one degree or another pretty much everyone was following similar regimens.

In short ... it's a different time. Which is why preseason games have become quaint anachronisms whose necessity long ago passed its expiration date. The only thing they're good for now is getting valuable commodities hurt in meaningless exhibitions. That they still exist at all is a testament only to the greed of the owners, for whom preseason games remain a source of revenue. It's why many of them make preseason games a mandatory part of their season ticket packages.

But enough is enough. The only argument to be made for preseason games anymore is that without them, play in the first week of the regular season is apt to be a tad rusty. To which the only apt response is "So what?"

Besides, NFL teams already conduct controlled scrimmages against one another during training camp. So what is truly the purpose of preseason games, other than another way for the NFL to fleece the paying customers?

Take your time answering. I'll wait.

Kid stuff

So here is this kid from South Korea, coming set now on the bump. He is the Little League World Series to me, an event that used to be charming and now is just more slick ESPN packaging. That's because he's 12-years-old and actually looks it.

I find this refreshing. Also comforting.

Some of these other 12-year-olds,  see, look like they just got their driver's licenses. But this kid, he looks 12. He looks like his favorite food is ice cream or Pop Rocks or maybe hamburger, which a screen graphic just told us is the favorite food of the Japanese batter at the plate.

I don't remember what that particular kid did on that at-bat. But I do know the Japanese team roughed up the poor South Korean kid pretty good. Loaded the bases on him and then scored two runs on a sharp single.

That bumped Japan's lead from 5-2 to 7-2, which was the final score. They were pretty machine-like, the Japanese. Executed a flawless double steal and worked the hit-and-run and did all the things you never see major league teams do anymore, on account of MLB is home run derby now and not really baseball in the purest sense.

So Japan advanced and, watching them, you fell into that trap you sometimes fall into watching the Little League World Series. You forget these are 11-, 12-year-old kids because they play the game far too well for their age. You keep waiting for them to do goofy 12-year-old things out there, and it almost never happens.

A for-instance: There was a woman sitting next to me at  the bar where I was watching Japan and South Korea the other day. She stared at the screen for a moment and then asked her boyfriend what level of baseball this was, because the players looked awfully small. She had no clue the players looked small because, well, they were kids, not tiny grownups.

And so, yes, thank God for that pitcher from South Korea, who actually looked his age. And thank God for what happened the other day, when the Cubs and the Pirates came to Williamsport to hang with the Little Leaguers and play a game.

There at the tail end of a 7-1 Cubs victory was reliever Craig Kimbrel, doing what he does. You've seen it: Right before he throws a pitch, he bends over at the waist and does this weird thing with his arms. Looks a little like the Karate Kid doing the Crane.

So there Kimbrel is, doing it. And up in the bleachers ... yep, sure enough, there's a bunch of Little Leaguers, imitating him. And for one wonderful moment, they look like what they are.

Kids. Just kids.

Conspiracy theory for today

And now the latest episode from what is rapidly becoming America's least favorite soap opera, AB Goes West, Sort Of ...

In our latest episode, new Raiders wide receiver Antonio Brown finally showed up again for practice after essentially holding out because he didn't like the way his new helmet fit.

This after the Raiders' GM Mike Mayock finally got fed up and said (essentially), "Quit jacking around and get your ass in here. It's time to go to work."

So everything is A-OK now on AB Goes West, Sort Of. He's gone back to work. Jon Gruden is happy. Ashley's boyfriend, in a coma since the accident, didn't wake up with amnesia after all.

Except ...

Except the Blob, which loves to picnic on the fabled Grass Knoll, has a theory about all this.

The Blob's theory is the kerfuffle over AB's helmet wasn't really about the helmet.

The helmet, the Blob believes, was a smokescreen. The problem with AB is at the other end of his body, and he/the Raiders are trying to keep it quiet.

The Blob thinks AB's feet still aren't tip-top, so to speak.

Oh, sure, he went off and got them worked on after sustaining severe frostbite during a cryogenic treatment in France. But that doesn't mean they're completely healed. And the Blob is wondering, given NFL teams' tendency to be, shall we say, less than forthcoming about injuries, if perhaps AB's feet are still an issue.

This is not a suspicion unique to the Blob, mind you. Plenty of other sports-talk yappers have suggested the same thing. After all, how AB's got his feet frostbitten to begin with was kind of embarrassing: He forgot to put on protective footwear before the cryogenic treatment.

So the Raiders now have a shiny, expensive new toy that might or might no be damaged goods. And you can understand why they might want to keep that quiet, too, given how much they shelled out for the guy.

Look. I don't know much, but I do know once you've had an extremity badly frostbitten, it tends to become a chronic issue. It becomes far more susceptible to the cold. I once knew a Korean War vet who got his feet severely frostbitten up on the Chosin Reservoir. Every time the weather turned cold, big lumps would pop up on the soles of his feet.

His souvenir from Frozen Chosin, he used to tell me.

So, anyway, I'm looking at the Raiders' schedule, and I see they're in New York in late November, and in Kansas City on Dec. 1, and in Denver on Dec. 29. Those places tend to get cold that time of year. And so ...

And so, I'm wondering how AB's feet are going to feel on those dates. And I'm wondering if the Raiders -- who, before he's even played a down, have clearly already had their fill of AB drama -- are wondering the same thing.

Or so it looks from the Grassy Knoll.

Your Hollywood script for today

Not many people pay a lot of attention to Arizona rookie league baseball these days, or any days, really. That's because, well, it's the Arizona rookie league. And it's also because fewer people are paying attention to baseball in general, now that it's basically become a Home Run Derby video game.

Batter comes up, batter goes yard. Batter comes up, batter strikes out swinging. Rinse. Repeat.

Anyway ... even though it is just the Arizona rookie league, something sort of wonderful happened the other night: A 23-year-old kid named Nathan Patterson, in his professional debut, struck out all three batters he faced.

And if you're asking here, "Why is that so wonderful, particularly?"...

Well. It's because the 23-year-old kid named Nathan Patterson was, a couple of months ago, just a fan.

One night earlier this summer, see, he went to a Colorado Rockies game and decided to try his luck at a radar gun pitching booth. The radar gun clocked him at 96 mph. Video of it went viral, and, lo and behold, suddenly the Oakland A's were signing him to a contract and shipping him to Arizona.

That was Hollywood-y enough. But then the kid strikes out the side in his first outing?

"Oh, come on!" every film exec in California just exclaimed.

(OK, so probably not. I mean, someone did do a film about Vince Papale, the bartender who became a special teams fan favorite with the Philadelphia Eagles. And there was that one film starring Dennis Quaid about a schoolteacher who wound up pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays. And there was "It Happens Every Spring," where a nerdy college professor played by Ray Milland became a star pitcher after developing a bat-dodging baseball. But you get drift.)

The drift being, Nathan Patterson is not Ray Milland, but just a guy with a lively arm. And this is not something that happens every day.

It is, you figure, exactly the sort of fairy tale every kid getting the full ESPN treatment out in Williamsport, Pa., right now still believes in. The Little League World Series may have become as slickly corporate as MLB these days, but the kids are still kids, and they still dream their dreams. And so a guy like Nathan Patterson?

He is their secular patron saint. And he is everything good about baseball, or at least what baseball was always meant to be.

Something to hang onto these days, as you watch another boring video game dinger land in the seats.