Bernstein: NFL Highlights Are Evolving With The Game
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) It doesn't need an image rebranding, yet, but the NFL's time is coming. It has to, despite it's current dominion over our culture.
The ratings and revenues are through the roof and to the stars. Football owns our eyes and ears, all while forces gather to change the game for reasons both cynical and humane, some ideas more fearful and self-protective, others genuinely concerned about the sport's looming existential crisis of battered brains and ruined lives.
Evolution can come, seven seconds at a time.
Though the concussiveness of the game has long been essential to the glory, the kill shots have been legislated out, and more impacts will be curtailed. This is reflected not only in the average network highlight package that features athleticism over violence more than ever but in the images that are shared by social media users.
Those of us of a certain age were raised on the blood-and-guts provided by NFL Films, the idealization of toughness amid crunching bones over the musical soundtrack of military propaganda. Blind-side hits to the quarterback's helmet, receivers speared by flying safeties and crack-back blocks on unsuspecting defenders rolled before us, selling a different kind of league.
Now it's Odell Beckham Jr., and the NFL needs more of him, the postmodern highlight generator.
It's every week in our timelines, his next full-extension fingertip grab, one-handed snag or balletic toe-tap, the Vine or animated .gif that captivates on autoplay and repeat. Or there's Cam Newton, threading a magic bullet of a pass over a helmet and around an arm, into the hands of a receiver who only he saw arriving at the only time he could.
If this were years ago, more of these shareable videos would be devastating collisions. The only time we see those pop up now is to crowd-source the discussion of proper penalties, fines and suspensions.
ESPN's Monday Night NFL Countdown has already stopped its "Jacked Up" segment, understanding the dissonance between celebrating brain injury and promising to work to prevent it. The compilation of slobber-knockers was already a relic of another football era when it ran and seems even more so today. That large editorial decision has been followed by a series of more subtle ones that now bring us something closer to basketball on grass, and that's not a bad thing at all.
The NBA's imagery has also changed over the same time, with less emphasis on the slam dunk and more on creativity of play. A league that has been ahead of the curve on the openness of file-sharing over copyright protection has been smart to showcase its more free-flowing action amid the accelerated globalization of style. Full-speed dribble moves and show-stopping Euro steps are as compelling as anything, now, while fans have become largely desensitized to the dunk. When half the league is built like Shawn Kemp was and even bums can move like Tom Chambers and Larry Nance, the old kind of highlights just don't resonate.
Stephen Curry is their Beckham, and they know it.
The NFL product has issues in the long form of its games, with the endless confusion over rules and interpretations stifling drama, numerous stoppages testing attention spans and the sad Thursday night spectacles of under-recovered human bodies shambling like so many undead. But those Vines just need a quick peek, and they can show some super stuff.
Pro football's lean and fast, stripped down and sped up. Pads have both shrunk and disappeared, making guys in those old films look like colorful astronauts smuggling furniture. In this game, everybody can run.
If this all is forced to try to become safer by some combination of collective consciousness and business instinct, it will have to counterbalance that by becoming more spectacular.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.