Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

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When I was in high school I was a Division I football prospect. I had multiple schools after me: Alabama, Florida, LSU, etc. I really wanted Miami (this was the '80s) but deep down I really wanted to play basketball. I only got a little sniff of DI basketball interest but I went on a football visit to Florida and saw massive guys hitting each other and thought "I'm going to get killed" and never took the football scholarship. I'm a big guy - 6'4", 225, I was pretty close to that size in high school and I was a pretty angry teenager so hitting guys at full speed was in my...well, 'nature'.

So please consider this when I say that those college guys were jacked up on 'roids' and WAAYY too big for me. I didn't take steroids in high school but I was big enough and strong enough (and in truth, angry enough) to play against those kids on 'roids anyway. I knew in college, I wouldn't have been.

I walked away from a certain Division I college scholarship (at the time - I blew out my knee a year later) despite what my coaches were calling a 'no-brainer' to play football. I've NEVER regretted it and each year that has passed since has made me even more glad I did it.

You sound remarkably similar to what Wayne Gretzky said after he retired. The last two years of his career, his Dad kept asking him if he was going to play another year.

He basically said, "I don't know. Every year I go back to camp, the guys are bigger, stronger and hit harder than last year."

When you look around the league, it's obvious how much bigger these guys have gotten. Look at some of the current LA KINGS forwards:

Jeff Carter - 6'4" - 212lbs

Dwight King - 6'4" - 230lbs

Anze Kopitar - 6'3" - 224lbs

Jordan Nolan - 6'3" - 221lbs

I'm assuming their heights are all reflected without wearing skates, which adds a good 2" to those heights. This is one of the reasons many pundits said LA won the cup in 2011. Big, strong forwards and a merciless forecheck. I still remember one of the announcers saying, "Imagine you're a defensemen and everytime LA drops the puck into the corner in your end and you have two of these guys hurtling towards you as you go for the puck. It's a defensemen's worst nightmare."

In hockey there's a strategy for this you both grab each other and slide in at the same time to avoid getting killed on the boards. When Gretzky played no other player could hit him because they didn't have the instigator rule, so if you clobbered him on the boards the biggest goons on his team would take your head off so the result was nobody touched Gretzky until late in his career when they put in that stupid rule.

Hockey also has the problem of players wearing body armor now so hits are even worse than what they used to be.

Well, it turns out football is a no-brainer after all, just not in the way your coaches meant.

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