Opinion: Does the attempt of keeping players safe diminish what different sports are about?

Noah Silver, Sports Editor|January 28, 2022

Curstine Guevarra

Coach Len Cusumano talks to one of the referees during halftime.

Bright daring eyes glaring at your competitor looking for their biggest weakness.

Don’t you love when you see that fierceful look in someone’s eyes, that feeling of doing whatever it takes to win? 

Well, I do and when referees get in the way of that it makes me furious. 

That look occurs in everyday life, however, professional sports are slowly beginning to regulate rules and further decrease the intensity of the players. 

I completely understand that football is a very dangerous sport; it revolves around 300-pound men tackling one another. 

Safety should and will always be the primary objective. However, it has gotten way out of hand and even to the point where coaches and players have complained about it.

Washington Football Team safety D.J. Swearinger told the Washington Times, “The game wasn’t designed to play tag. The game was designed to hit people. We put on pads to hit people. That’s how the game was made. You disrespect the game of football when you bring all these bull rules. You sign up for this game to be physical, not to play two-hand touch.”

Sports is where people take out their vicious behavior and put it into their competitive nature. However, this behavior is slowly starting to become less hostile and more cordial.

Players are now using fouls to their advantage as in different sports you can see prime examples of flopping or exaggerating a push to allow a penalty or foul to be assessed. 

A primary example of the bitter softness of sports players is in soccer. I myself am a soccer player and I hate when people call it a “soft” sport. 

Professional soccer players dive and act until they get the foul called their way. This is not what sports are nor what is expected in club soccer or high school soccer. 

According to Sportskeeda, “Diving has plagued the game since time unknown, but it is getting worse by the day. This begs a question of referees’ abilities to separate fouls from dives and whether such actions call for stricter punishments.”

Professional soccer players aren’t just athletes they are role models, they are people who get looked up to on the daily yet the modeling that they have been doing lately isn’t quite oblique.