The Green Dot

I have been a football fan for more than 35 years now. I have seen many changes in the National Football League. Different styles, new and improved design changes in equipment, and so on.
I also have always been the type of person that pays very close attention to detail. If you watch TV or a movie with me, you may find that several times during the production, I will point out technical errors.
For instance, perhaps someone in a movie is speaking and from one camera shot they have a corsage on their lapel, and then in the next shot the corsage is missing. Switch back to the first angle and the flower reappears. Those are the kinds of things that I notice.
I also have been good at, especially when I was growing up and we collected baseball cards and actually read magazines, noticing changes in uniforms in sports. Even to this day, I could tell the difference when the Miami Dolphins added that touch of blue in their logo, for example, or when any other changes, no matter how subtle or slight, were made to team uniforms.
Last year during training camp I noticed that the Minnesota Vikings changed their style of unis, and the year before that when there was a change made in the NFL officials’ uniforms.
Usually, when there is any kind of league-wide change to team uniforms, whether it be something that is added or deleted, we will learn about these changes when we watch the games on television. The announcers will normally make us aware of the changes and the reason or reasons for the changes.
Until this year. There has been a change that I have noticed, it has been a league-wide alteration, and for some reason, to this day (Week 9 in the NFL just passed), nothing has been mentioned about it.
The announcers haven’t talked about it. I haven’t seen any story about it on the internet. I watch 4-6 NFL games per week and I haven’t heard anything mentioned.
It is a small change, a change so subtle that as the first few weeks of the season went on, and I found myself watching a game with someone that I know for the first time of the season, I would ask if they noticed it, or if they had heard what it was for. One by one, they all informed me that they had neither seen it before or heard why the change was made.
You can see this difference literally 100 times per game. It’s a small thing, something little, but I have been looking at it constantly each and every Sunday and Monday for the last nine weeks and still no one has explained where it came from or why it is now there, and it’s really beginning to annoy me.
How could this difference in the NFL uniform be on television screens from coast to coast 50-100 times per game, but yet be ignored by the announcers of the game all season long, as if it’s a secret, league-initiated coup that everyone is to be tight-lipped about, something that they don’t want the fans to know about.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, or maybe you still haven’t even noticed it, it’s the little green dot that is currently on the back of every NFL quarterback’s helmet.
I don’t know where the green dot came from, and thus far, no one has been willing to talk about it.
They haven’t mentioned it on Sports Center, on any of the pre-game shows, any Website, in any magazine, or by any of the announcers during the games.
What is the reason for the green dot? What is its significance? What is it trying to tell us? I don’t know the answers to these questions and it’s bothering me tremendously.
Now that I have mentioned what it is, you can clearly see that I was not exaggerating when I said that you can see it at least 100 times per game.
You can see the dot before every play, when the quarterback is huddling up the team, is in the huddle, or perhaps when he’s calling out the signals at the line of scrimmage and he turns his head to shout to the other side.
I have come to believe that most TV announcers do a pretty good job of letting us know the new developments in the teams, and even the uniforms, at season’s beginning.
But somehow the NFL has snuck in this little green dot without heed or warning. They have not offered us any explanation as to why we are forced to stare at this hideous little lime green circle all day and night on Sundays and for three hours on Monday night. And I want answers. And the sooner, the better, folks, because I haven’t been alerted to reason of the little fluorescent sticker’s existence, and the more I see it, the more I wonder just what the NFL is up to now. And, more importantly, why aren’t they talking about it.