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The biggest problem with this is it ruins Madden. Sometimes I get bored and onside kick every time. No matter what strategy I employ though, I always win.

I think this is a great idea, but a little known team from the deep south sprung one on a lesser known team from somewhere in South Carolina a few months back with 10min left in the 3rd quarter. One could argue that it won them the game and those boys from bama got to hold up a big golden vagina afterwards.

Whenever these rule changes come up, my first thought is "meh, that hardly ever happens so I probably won't miss it." As more discussion goes on, I am reminded that it's the rare occurrences that make football fun to watch. What if we got rid of blocking kicks? What if we outlawed kicking any field goal over 50 yards? What if we just assigned victory to whatever team wins the coin toss in OT?

Interestingly, roughly 28% of all college football players will self-report a concussion. There are about 12650 players across all of college football. If we go down to a single year of players (this is the same as saying "in any given year of football") that's about 3162 players in a class. Of those, about 885 will get a concussion. So if you reduce 200 concussions per years, you've just done away with roughly 20% of all concussions in the sport (I'm rounding down to account for the plays that we run instead of the kickoffs adding in a few concussions).

If I recall correctly, it has ESPNU and a bunch of other stuff I may or may not use. During football season, I think ESPNU carries enough games that it's probably worth the 5 bucks even if I never watch any of the other channels. Since they don't lock you in for a year or more like cable or satellite, I like the option of just paying an extra $5/month for a few months of football season and then cutting it off 'til next year.

What if the NCAA tries this in order to at least eliminate some risk –

Give the return team the touchback option BEFORE the kickoff. Prior to every kickoff, the return team can opt out and take the ball at the 25 yard line. In order to keep the onside kick as part of the strategy, the touchback option is null during the last two minutes of the game. Most teams are not going to try an onside kick before the 2:00 mark. (At least the ones that can do arithmetic aren't going to anyway.)

...the power of Disney...

That's crooked

Allow me to introduce you to the NCAA...

funny cause when I think of a team sport that has a very low likelihood of injury, I think baseball, not soccer.

okay. why?

We're seeing it two different ways. I see "protecting" people by changing the game as a bad thing. I'm not saying that people should shut up and play the game. It is important for people to know the consequences of playing a game as physically dangerous as football. It's great that a lot of research has gone into the study of concussions and that we're learning that concussions can have serious long term effects. What we need to avoid is coddling parents and children by telling them we're taking the dangers out of a still-very-dangerous game. Educate them. Let them know the risks. Keep the game the same and if they don't want to take the risk they don't have to. It feels like a bad used car salesmen saying that he's going to install seat-belts in a car you think is a death-trap in order to sell it to you. Changing the rules stinks of catering to the concerns of the public in order to keep people interested in the game. It's still a dangerous game. If you remove kick-offs you're still going to have concussions. Just like if you put seat belts in a car with no air-bags you can still have fatal accidents.

Removing a significant part of the game just to "prevent concussions" isn't a move to make the sport better. It's a move to quell the concerns about a dangerous game. They are trying to say "this game isn't that dangerous, you can still play...it's okay...you can't get hurt now.."

That's crooked. Tell them straight up that this game is dangerous. Leave the rules the same.

Otherwise, you change the rules and give people this false sense that the game is getting safer (and it is, marginally) in order to keep them funneling their children into the sport. It's a sales pitch. Removing the kick-off is drastic. It's a hail-mary attempt to keep people interested in the game in light of recent revelations.

It's bad for our culture because you tell people something is safer when it really isn't THAT much safer, and they expect one thing and get another. We're masking stuff and telling people we're going to protect them so they'll keep buying our products when we're really only interested in them continuing to buy our products.

It's the pussification of America because you're encouraging people to play a tough, dangerous, game under the pretense that it's safe and then when somebody does get hurt everybody will get all up-in-arms about it. They believe they're entitled to some compensation because they were told it was safe and yet they still got hurt. They play a game that is inherently and obviously dangerous under the false believe that its not that dangerous.

You leave the game the way it is and tell people "hey this game is going to hurt you and could even cause long term problems down the road." You lay it out for them and if they decide to play (they don't have to, and obviously I wouldn't recommend it...but to each their own) they can't complain when they get hurt. You change the game, sell it as safer, and then somebody gets hurt, they whine and cry about it and act like little sissys because they were told they weren't supposed to get hurt and now that they are hurt it's someone else's fault.

This might not seem like such a big deal when you're just talking about football, because it's just a sport, but the idea driving the move is prevalent in other aspects of life and is very much a part of our society and culture. We are weakening the perceptive prowess of the general public in order to make it easier to sell them stuff they don't need.

Fox Sports is reportedly in the process of bringing the AAC into its own network so I dont think the ACC would have ended up being their first. That said, I also dont think Fox Sports is close to ESPN in terms of overall network capacity. Fox is growing, certainly but ESPN has as many as 19 channels on my Comcast lineup I believe and it may be more for channels even I dont have and that doesnt even account for the power of Disney being behind it if it needed to really separate itself from Fox. Some of Fox presentations certainly have better quality it terms of innovation and presentation than ESPN right now but I also think you have started to see ESPN respond to that with a complete overhaul of their production sets, their change from "Sportscenter" being a constant one show all day to now being broken up over four different productions, one from the East coast studio, two from the West Coast studio and then the late night/all night from Bristol with Scott Van Pelt. They also have significantly ramped up hiring and fine tuning of their staffs for a variety of shows. Just here in DC we have lost as many as 8 sports related broadcasters to ESPN in the last three years.

For some reason I just can see this going a second season and being as good. Despite the doors they left open with the last couple scenes, if the plot lines advance they can't keep the same feel to the show. A lot of the appeal was learning about the characters. Why is El the way she is? What's the deal with the chief? Is steve really this much of an ahole? Now that a lot of the questions have been answered, the nature of the show would change or they'd have to shift the focus to new characters (which works I guess). That being said, I really hope they find a way to continue the story and keep it as engaging.

I kind of like the fact that when it was all done, I thought "well that's over" instead of "dammit, now I have to wait til next season airs to find out [blank]." In my mind it's more like a 10 part movie, which I greatly prefer to your typical tv show where there is no impetus to wrap anything up and they just drag out interesting story lines until they aren't.