The game of football has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Just watch the games on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (or Mondays and Thursdays). No longer is it the rough-and-tumble style of football centered around physicality, grinding out wins, and winning ugly.
Instead, it’s more of a finesse game, aimed at being more wide-open, like basketball on turf. Fans, for the most part, want high-scoring, action-packed games, not the old-school, defensive-minded games of yesteryear.
That bothers Pittsburgh Steelers’ star defensive lineman and team captain Cameron Heyward. In an interview with GoLong.com’s Ty Dunne, Heyward said that he believes people have become too enamored with high-scoring games and that they care more about style points than actually doing their jobs and winning games, even if it’s ugly.
The Steelers know a thing or two about winning ugly, especially in recent years.
“A lot of people have just become so enamored with high-scoring games,” Heyward said to Dunne, according to GoLong.com. “I was always raised to ‘win the game.’ It doesn’t matter how. … I think in football — and in sports in general — we care too much about style points and not enough about executing and being able to say, ‘We got the W.’”
Heyward is spot-on. That’s how sports are viewed at this point, though. It’s like that across every sport. Baseball introduced a pitch clock to help speed up games, reduced the number of pickoff attempts to help increase steals, and scoring went up across the board. In basketball, especially the NBA, scoring is at an all-time high. Games in the 130s and 140s are far more common now than teams scoring in the 90s like they were during the 1980s and 1990s.
Scoring in hockey is up significantly as people want to see high-flying action, even if it’s sloppy. Football is no different.
The Steelers don’t exactly play that way. Instead, they are focused on winning low-scoring games, executing within those games, and mucking things up to win ugly.
More often than not, in the last three years or so, that’s worked for the Steelers. Winning is all that matters. But when the going gets tough for the Steelers, especially against great teams in the NFL, they aren’t able to keep up with the high-flying pace and match it with their own execution.
The game has changed, and the consumer has changed some, too. It’s a social media-driven world, where highlights such as big catches, long runs, and jaw-dropping throws get far more attention than a good block on a third and short run, or a great tackle in the open field to shut down a potential big play.
Action, action, action. That’s what drives people now. It’s hard to come to grips with for some, and that’s understandable. But in the end, all that glitz and glamour doesn’t matter without the win. That’s where Heyward is at. It doesn’t matter how it looks; just win. There’s a beauty in that for Heyward.
