We Let Too Many Nerds Infiltrate The World Of Sports
There was a time when nerds weren't even allowed to think about sports without getting strapped to a flagpole from their underwear. It was a simpler time in human existence. Once in which status quos were respected, instead of intentionally broken. Jocks had sports, nerds had whatever it is that they would care about, and the two species were able to coexist without having a need to cohabitate. The way life should be.
Somewhere along the line, baseball ruined everything. Some dickhead with a calculator decided to come up with something called "analytics", and the world has never been the same. All of a sudden, nerds had a place in sports. They'd come up with some bullshit equations to turn the games into a sequence of 1's and 0's, and jocks were dumb enough to fall for it. Next came fantasy sports, then came podcasts, and now I'd say that sports are primarily driven by nerds.
We lost our way as a society without even knowing the fabric thread was pulling apart. But I think we've finally reached a breaking point thanks to Benjamin Solak.
This kid who looks like he got out of gym class every day at school because his "tummy hurt" has no IDEA how Josh Allen didn't find Khalil Shakir on that pivotal 4th and 5 in the AFC Championship. He even went as far as to break down how much of a dumbass Josh Allen was by not finding Shakir on film.
Now obviously when you put it like that, sure, it would have made a lot of sense for Josh Allen to hit Khalil Shakir on that play. But you can do that with literally anything. The dinosaurs should have built an iron dome around the planet to avoid getting wiped out by the meteor. Archduke Franz Ferdinand should have hit a roll back to avoid getting assassinated to start WWI. Magic Johnson shouldn't have had unprotected sex with all those women. The list goes on and on of things that are easy to point out after the fact that would have significantly altered the outcome.
There was a time when we lost our way a little bit, and we were afraid to push back against these nerds. The whole anti-bullying campaign really put us in a bind there. You couldn't call them out because you were fearful of getting labeled as a big mean bully. But fortunately for everyone, it appears that time is changing. And guys are finally starting to stuff nerds back into the lockers again.
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Okay so we have a tale of two Ryans here. Fitz was a little more measured in his approach to calling Ben Solak a fucking dork who doesn't know anything about ball. Leaf was a little more aggressive and may have crossed a few lines or two. But either way, the fact is that we've allowed nerds to feel so comfortable in the world of sports that they now think they know more than guys who have played the quarterback position in the NFL. They think their data models and countless hours playing Madden give them enough credibility to say Josh Allen has no idea what he's doing out there.
It doesn't have to be this way. We've gotten so caught up in the numbers of sports. Whether it's stats, or contracts, or win probabilities, or whatever. Sports aren't about numbers. They're about putting a ball out on a field, and having two groups of people wearing different colored costumes try to fuck each other up over it. Whether it's running that ball into an area of the field 100 yards away, shooting that ball through a basket, hitting that ball with a bat over a wall, etc. Pretty simple if you ask me. Numbers don't play ball, athletes do.