A belief that the gloves most NFL players are using nowadays are making it a bit too easy to catch a football is spreading. In a video testing out this conjecture, Rick Reilly, an ESPN columnist, proves that the most advanced NFL-grade receiving gloves can turn anyone — from a player on a losing high school football team to a taxi driver — into a human highlight reel.
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Experiments such as Reilly’s make it easy to see why the NFL has begun looking into whether the gloves worn by stars such as Odell Beckham, Jr. and Jarvis Landry are truly making it too easy to catch a football. Although super-sticky gloves and the advantages they provide for wide receivers are not nearly as detrimental to football as, say, steroids are to baseball, the NFL is right to be concerned about the negative impact current gloves are having on the game. “Super-gloves” are fundamentally changing football to the point where, as John Madden noted, “pretty soon, these gloves are going to be able to catch a ball without a hand in them.” And the fact of the matter is that players no longer have to rely on their talent to make mind-boggling plays on the field — as NFL Executive VP of Football Operations Troy Vincent said, “the gloves now are so tacky that it’s taking away from the true skill level [of players].”
The predicament the NFL currently faces with gloves that are making football too easy of a game is part of a much larger issue that is beginning to impact the entire sports world. Have athletics gotten to the point where abilities can be so heavily augmented by technology that true talent and skill are entirely obsolete? This is a problem that has plagued baseball for years, as lifetime minor leaguers and superstars alike have used performance enhancing drugs to prove that pure strength is enough to succeed at America’s pastime.
More recently, and in a significantly more technological way, the use of motors on bicycles in the pro cycling universe has created a dichotomy between who is actually a great biker, and who found a way to hide a motor best. Perhaps the gloves the NFL is dealing with aren’t truly cheating, since every player has access to them, but there’s no doubt that the gloves are making football about a lot more than… well, about a lot more than football.
As much as NFL fans love seeing backwards-leaping, one-handed catches, it’s high time that followers of America’s most popular sport recognize that the gloves most wide receivers wear are taking more away from the game than they are adding to it. And if the NFL wants to do what’s best for football going forward, it will have to take an unprecedented step into the past and ensure that catching a football is more about skill and less about impersonating a gecko.