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.

5. Super-imposed TV first-down line

Here is a development that really doesn’t affect how the game is played, but heightens fan enjoyment through the magic of technology. Sportvision, a small startup company, is credited with introducing this amazing innovation in 1997 on ESPN. To TV viewers, the use of this First-and-Ten Yellow Line appears to be part of the field. It’s so well engineered that there are no telltale signs of it being anything other than part of the field. The line instantly provides a reading on how much distance is needed for a first down and often relegates chain gangs to confirming what millions of TV watchers already know.

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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.”

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