Not Your Dad’s Sports

By: Mathias Woerner Sports Editor

As us here at the USF Encounter take a look back at some recent decades for some good nostalgia and wistful yearning for what once was, its time to snap out of the fever dream and make us feel better about the progress we’ve made. In the arena of sports, the meritocracy that seeks out results and production above all, where innovation and progression are not only coveted, but invaluable to the impact on wins and losses, the comparison of how sports are played, treated, and cultivated from decades past to now is worlds apart. Sports moments live indelibly in our minds as if they just happened yesterday, but how soon we are to forget the conditions that athletes, coaches, and staff dealt with and how stark the differences are to the landscape as it exists now.

Nutrition has always been an everchanging and improving industry, with its relation to sports being no different. Over time, as organizations have had to make decisions about their sports programs, their considerations for health and nutrition have been growing, allowing it to become a crucial and highly specialized field to help professional and amateur athletes perform at their best and redefine what their potential could be. Sports nutrition certainly has come a long way from the late Len Dawson burning down a heater at halftime of the Super Bowl.

Going hand in hand with the growth of nutrition in sports, medical biology and technological advancement has paved the way for the concept of SportsScience. Studying the various ways to improve practice, conditioning, workouts, and recovery have made training for an athlete a scrutinized competition off the field of play.

The most obvious way sports have changed for fans over the last 20 or so odd years is the shift from the onus of decision making being on people to the growing movement towards analytics and sabermetrics. These concepts have altered the way we experience sports in the last couple of decades in more observable ways. Leaning into the data has been jumped on across the sports frontier in drastic ways. In baseball, this has resulted in emphasis on the three true outcome approach for hitters, where the goal is to hit a home run, if you can’t get a pitch good enough to do that, you get a walk, and if you fail and strike out, oh well, it’s the same as putting the ball in play. The changes that analytics have brought to baseball got to the point that wholesale changes to the sport are having to be made to make it feel more like the baseball fans are familiar with. In football, analytics have coincided with offensive leaning rule changes in the NFL to make teams much more aggressive and risky with their play style. This has come up in 4th Down decisions, play call variety, and player versatility. For the sport of basketball, the tide of sabermetrics has homogonized the game and made athletes flock to the threepoint line. In this past NCAA tournament we saw how the Florida Atlantic Owls made it all the way to the Final Four as a nine seed with extreme reliance on the three-point shot.

The treatment of athletes has improved and will continue to improve with the advancements and innovation of nutrition and training. It’s important to remember that these improvements do not necessarily go hand in hand with gameplay quality, aesthetic value, or the experience for the fans. The direction of sports will be dependent these factors adding up to a better product and experience for all.