Probably all true, but I'm old and I don't think long term future stuff anymore, I just think in this moment, and this first year will be silliness
Fact is people all around the globe are largely the same in terms of natural born ability, so once they start focusing on a sport from a young age, they can compete with anyone. We have a head start, but there's nothing exceptional about our natural abilities.
Sure, but learned ability also matters, and conventional football wisdom does a lot to pigeonhole young American football players.
Imagine a world where your All-Pro caliber TE also played rugby as a native Australian for a good amount of their young life, and is so good at backwards passing that you have a legitimate hook and ladder threat
regularly based on if the pass is there in a split read, and he'll either dive for yards or hit a streaking low man for an extra who knows how many yards... I mean, that's the speed they
play that game at anyway, just a weapon and play style the NFL has rules for that nobody is utilizing.
As for the second point, yes, but also no. Now, don't get me wrong, football is such a dynamic and varied athletic approach that there
are in fact positions for everybody but I wouldn't say it's always a 1:1. It's not like we're different species or anything, all
homo sapiens
, but it's right in line with how the Dutch are statistically the tallest people in the world, or how various countries have had eras of dominance in the 100m but it took until 2018 for a Chinese man to hit world class status. An outrageously talented outlier can make a difference but when we consider national infrastructure in sports it doesn't often go towards ones the country isn't statistically likely to win. Be it infrastructure, climate, or a slight predisposition to certain genetic stuff Olympic sports tend to show some bias in certain directions.
It's nature and nurture, but sometimes the nurture comes easily because of nature. For football it kind of doesn't matter because football is
really weird and compartmentalized and the problem is exposure. That said, there's also a reason there's basically only been one Yao Ming, the stars don't align for the same group of people when there aren't the same number of opportunities, so
making the opportunities matters a lot.
EDIT: that got kind of inadvertently racial for somebody who agrees 100% with the premise that anybody could become anything and we're all human, all I really meant is that we see a lot of players of "different origins" as far as listed birth who also moved here very early and began playing football with all the other kids at the entry level. I just want an NFL where "moved here early" didn't have to be part of the conversation, I'd love to see a little nationally Japanese RB just out there tearing it up like Barry Sanders until he's chased down and trucked by the Irish John Lynch.
