The NFL has restricted the extent to which teams may use highlights during games on social media. Two teams have found a great way to work around the rules.
Via Deadspin, both the Browns and Eagles have employed old-school electric football figures to simulate the action on the field.
Hopefully, more will follow suit -- both to demonstrate the fallacy of the prohibition and because I’m a member of the generation that wasted hundreds of hours aligning the 11-man defense, the 10-man offense, and the oversized freak of a “triple-threat” quarterback that could run, throw, and kick before flipping the switch and watching a third of the figures spin in circles, another third move the wrong way, and another third do what they were supposed to do before the play ended in a matter of seconds.
And then we’d line them up again, hopeful that eventually the action on the thin green sheet of vibrating metal would look something like the real thing. That fact that it never did was never a deterrent.
Maybe it eventually should have been.