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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 6206990" data-attributes="member: 19675">Lets take it back to the original setting: a HS football game, with players ranging from 14-19.  One team was simply better.  The winning coach did everything within his power to avoid running up the score except punting on 1st down.  Doing that would have been detrimental to the enjoyment of participation that this own team's bench-warmers would rarely get.  Some of those kids may only play about 6 quarters of game play over the course of the season.Some of the players on the losing team may also be among the 1% of 1% who may actually go pro.  Not likely, but possible.  The NFL. Has no mercy rule.  Lets say they end up on a team that is worse than the Giants, Jaguars or Buccaneers of this season*...the worst team of the new century. Without ever experiencing something like this loss, will they be able to handle an analogous loss in national TV?  Nobody is going to pull their punches on the next day's rehash.  And heaven forfend said worst team is in a market like NY, Boston or Philly, where the press can be notoriously harsh.Clearly, one of these football teams- if not both- were playing in the wrong division...at least, this year.  The winning team may be so "elite" that a division with the proper level of competitiveness does not exist outside of the state championship games.And 5 years from now, they could be on the receiving end of such a loss.(In the 1980s my college FB team was so bad, we sold off part of the stadium to a local HS.  In the 1990s, they won a couple of National Championships in their division.)The answer isn't to remove the possibility of abject failure.  The answer is to have a system that deals with it if and when it occurs.  Make it administratively easier for teams to change divisions...and have administrators who can do the job of assessing which team belongs in which division as well.And make the schools responsible for doing a proper "talent" assessment as well.  We don't need schools choosing to play in a lesser division in order to be the "big fish in a small pond."  Or setting their charges up for a season of failure because you thought you might be able to take a couple of games in the higher divisions.Besides, are kids more vulnerable to emotional trauma than adults?  If so, isn't it largely because they lack the experience most adults have from being exposed to emotionally traumatic experiences in childhood?  My gut feeling leads me to believe this is mostly ttrue.  Yeah, there may be an innate baseline for handling trauma, but life teaches us how to deal with greater amounts. But to do so requires a world that allows for risk of being hurt.* Actually, there was a discussion along these lines tonight on ESPN, with a panel of former NFL stars discussing the collapse of Tampa Bay, centering on the difference between those teammates who could take a loss like tonight's- in the context of their crappy season thus far- and those who would simply surrender on the season and their team.  Unanimously, they talked about the rarity of the former, and the ubiquity of the latter.</blockquote>

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