Skip to footer

The NFL: 16 ways the game has changed in the Super Bowl era

Forty-seven years after the first Super Bowl was played in Los Angeles before a less-than-capacity crowd, let’s look back at some of the ways the NFL has changed.

9. Better fields

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Playing conditions have improved greatly since 1966, when there were a lot of grass fields that wore thin late in the season and no domed stadiums (the AFL’s Houston Oilers didn’t move into the Astrodome until 1968). What first-generation artificial turf fields existed tended to be more like hard doormats than natural grass fields.

Today, seven teams play either in permanently domed stadiums (New Orleans, Detroit, Minnesota, and St. Louis) or in retractable domes (Houston, Phoenix, and Indianapolis).

Great improvements have been made in the look and feel of artificial grass fields to the point where sometimes it’s hard for TV viewers to tell the difference between the real and manufactured fields. Even teams that elect to play on grass have gone to sophisticated growing and drainage systems that help the fields hold up much better than in the past.

9 of 16
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.