Change.
What people like me feel is necessary for the future of football is change. Not just change for the sake of change, but change that will forever change the game in a positive direction. Let's talk about the innovation of the forward pass for example.
In the early 1900s, there were actually calls for the government to intervene and ban football because of injury risks. Yes, this actually happened, it's documented, go look it up on Wikipedia if you must. The then president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, heavily weighed in on the subject because of how loud such calls had gotten at that time. Roosevelt decided not to ban football, but said that there needed to be changes to make football safer to play. The year of this massive change, 1906. Yes, the year of the first legal forward pass in professional football history is 1906.
In a game in the then Ohio League (one of the several leagues that preceded the NFL), the first legal forward pass was thrown in October of 1906. The sport has not looked back since and the forward pass is as integral in the game as it has ever been. That is the type of change we need now, although I'd argue for very different reasons. Yes, there have been attempts at such change such as Indoor/Arena Football and more recently the A7FL, but they haven't touched the nerve or had the long term effects that the forward pass has had. One of the original names I was thinking of for this project before I settled on Brand New Shield was “Next Forward Pass”.
Brand New Shield is actually much more apropos than Next Forward Pass because of what I'm going to get into on this blog and the podcast once I start that up. It also signifies where the change and innovation is needed. I don't think the NFL can be directly competed with, but I do think there are opportunities where others like the USFL and Arena Football League have failed and where currently the UFL is failing.
What we need is another forward pass, but on an organizational and structural level. We need innovation, we need to think outside the box, and we need to strive to make the game better. We cannot just be singularly focused on profit like the current structures in place seem to be. We need to change the perception of what is possible by being both radical and realistic.
Change. For the better. We can get this done. Together.