Future Shock: Tuesday Open Thread

Thank god the football season is over, so I can get back to enjoying football.

Yes, we are finally past What is Happening and into What Will Happen Next, an altogether more hopeful phase for the vast majority of fans. Free agency, the draft, the potential for your miserable owner to have a stroke while vacationing on his ultrayacht Poors Can Suck It VI. The world is our oyster.

Who knows, maybe the Joe Brady Experiment in Buffalo will end up being the Doug Collins-Phil Jackson transition that gets the Bills over the top. One of the reasons I enjoy reading old non-fiction is that it puts you back in the moment and makes you realize that even our very brightest have no clairvoyance.

Example: I am currently reading Paul Zimmerman’s The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football. Note that this “New” version was published in 1984, an update of the original 1970 book. He talks about the outlawing of the defensive line head-slap in 1977 as a relatively recent development to which teams are still adjusting. John Elway was an unproven second-year player, who had thrown twice as many interceptions (14) as touchdowns (7) and who had been benched multiple times in his rookie season for Steve DeBerg. Dan Marino is debated as a potential flash-in-the-pan. Terry Bradshaw was Pittsburgh’s starting quarterback looking to come back from a late-season elbow injury suffered at Shea Stadium- an injury that would in fact end his career.  300 pounds for an offensive lineman is truly monstrous, instead of constructively a minimum (94% of rostered offensive linemen Week 1 2023 were over 3 bills).

Now, Dr. Z is a venerated hero in the DFO Pantheon for a reason- he was brilliant, analytical, and funny as hell. And he was one of the earliest sports writers to openly discuss the role steroids were playing- and would continue to play- in the game, famously getting banned from television coverage in the late 80s for mentioning it during the draft. But even the best knowledge, access and analysis didn’t give him insight into what the game would look like 40 years later- nor even 10 years later. He was as much a prisoner of then-current information as anyone else. Kind of like watching old sci-fi’s predictions about the world in the Far Distant Future of 2000 (or 1997, in the case of Escape from New York), it’s fascinating to see where expectations diverged from reality from these then-current sources.

Similarly, I highly recommend Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson. Published in 1973, it is largely made up of Thompson’s 1972 semi-monthly articles for Rolling Stone covering the presidential election. Expectations and predictions from early articles are already exploded in later months. Major players are now names no one but true sickos even remember, while minor weirdos with cameos like Pat Buchanan would later become hugely influential. The biggest unseen shadow, of course, is Watergate- a scandal and fall that even the rabidly anti-Nixon HST could never foresee.

ANYWAY:

It’s a good overall reminder that the Current Prevailing Wisdom is generally dead flat wrong in important respects over any but the shortest timeline, and that most “Guy Who Saw This Coming” folks are (at best) hitting a low-probability guess.

And that is why I am willing to NOT abandon hope that the Bills may still be good and are not going to come apart at the seams this year. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.