If you are one of those nostalgic types, you might insist football players were better when you were young. You are wrong. Kids today are bigger and faster. When my local football team, Folsom, played Grant for the first game of the season this year, I predicted a loss of 35 points despite the fact that Folsom wins most of its games by 40 - and that would be a good showing. My reasoning? Two kids on the other team could bench press 400 lbs and weighed over 300, 5 would go to top schools on scholarships. When I went to college, it was a big deal to bench press 300 lbs. for a football player.
I have my recordings of the 1970s Steelers Super Bowls and, despite being the most dominant team of that decade, a guy the size of Jack Ham couldn't even start on the Lawrence Academy (Massachusetts) high school team today.
Fellow league school St. George took one look at their opponents and made a command decision - they refused to play.
"This is strictly a safety issue,'' St. George's headmaster Eric Peterson told the Boston Globe. "We are trying to keep our kids reasonably safe in a game that can be terribly exciting but has risks."
Fair enough, but then they had to get snooty and elitist about it - okay, as long as they don't have to play them again; "Our students are into much more than athletics. Athletic success is so secondary in a place like this" implying the other team are just dumb jocks and the teachers and administration don't care about education.
