It's got me wondering what football would be like if it were more like cycling:
- If you're the closest to the goal line, you "have the ball."
- You can call a time outs whenever you want, but the other team can keep playing without you
- The same guys play offense and defense.
- The defense does not get a head start in order to get between the offense and the goal.
- The game is played on concrete, asphalt, and/or dirt roads.
- The only pads you are allowed to have are a helmet and gloves.
- There are no mid-game substitutions. If someone gets hurt, you play without them.
- If you get hurt, the game continues without you. Someone will be along to help... eventually. And it might be a 4 hour drive to the hospital.
- The season lasts from January through October and runs on multiple continents.
- The games are a minimum of 5 hours of actual playing time.
- The game does not stop for commercials.
- The goal line is 110 miles from where you start. Good luck kicking a field goal.
- You play 3 to 4 games a week unless it's grand tour season, when you race every day for three weeks straight.
- If you win too much (i.e., enough that they have even heard of you), people just assume you are taking some kind of performance enhancing drug.
- The fans are close enough to trip you. Sometimes they do.
- The average professional player makes $70,000 a year (compared to $1.9 million for the NFL) and spends half his game fetching water and food from a moving car so that someone else try to win.
- You need to be one of the best in your home country just to get a job. Cycling's top level, the UCI Protour, only has 18 teams with 30 riders each (540 riders total, from any country in the world) compared to the 32 NFL teams with 53 players each (1696 players total, mostly from the US).
- The best defense truly is a good offense. The only way to win is to get to the finish line first.
