OT Comedy: Today's coaches vs old school coaches

The short version: I hate this sentiment. It's completely upside down, at least as it pertains to modern college football at a major university. Moreover I find the sentiment to be counterproductive, as it's less about being funny than being mean while lying to oneself.

The funniest thing about this is there's an almost identical sketch about coaching in the 1980s vs coaching in the 1950s, and another identical sketch about coaching in the 1950s vs the 1930s. The historical accuracy here is zero point zero; adults remember things being harder than they are and imagine kids today have it easier than they do, and then the cycle repeats itself with the next generation. Millennials are making "ha ha Gen Z so coddled" jokes now.

Here are the actual, historical shifts in coaching styles:

• pre-1890s: Teams have no idea how to play the game, hire recent grads from schools that play to instruct them for a few weeks. Bigger schools have an athletic trainer who's more like a university-level gym teacher. Coaches stick around for as little as a week or at most 12 weeks, and their average age is 22.
   
• 1890s-WW2: Starting with Chicago, teams start hiring professional coaches and athletic directors to oversee them. Coaches are either Yost-style (positive reinforcement) or Stagg-style (system-based). Many stay at their universities for 30+ years, coaches grow more venerable and into AD positions as time goes by. Assistants are like the pre-1890s coaches: itinerant and young, mostly.
   
• Post-War: Ballooning rosters, budgets, stadiums, meets a new drill sergeant type who treats the players like they're at boot camp and can get away with culling the rosters because there are no scholarship limits (see: Junction Boys, or "Those Who Stay..". As teams grow to 100+ players assistants become more professionalized and are often the good cop, younger, unmarried, and worked to the bone while told if they wait 30 years they'll be head man.
   
• Post-2000: Wider recruiting and more communication between parents and players starts to whittle away at the Bo/Woody/Bear style of coach in favor of CEO types who use business efficiency strategies to implement systems (Carroll, Saban, Tressel, Urban, Dabo, Smart, Harbaugh). More talk of individual program "cultures" to convince more mobile talent to stick around. Assistant hierarchies form with coordinators acting like HCs of their units, subordinate assistants who do most of the training and recruiting, and large staffs who do scouting work and some of the technique stuff.

I wouldn't call any of them steps towards more "coddling." If anything more and more is asked of players each step of the way. Originally they were just getting some tips from guys about their own age, then they were expected to not smoke for part of the year and say "Sir", then they were soldiers, and now they have everything they eat, every moment they sleep, every second they work out and go to school tracked and optimized.

Here's the truth: Younger generations are tougher, better, smarter, taller, and in general can kick us oldersters asses in everything but trivia about being alive when we were and they weren't. Because that's how humans do it. We advance our technology and our culture, spend a lot of resources to make our lives comfortable, die, and repeat the process.

The reason we olds like pretending we got some sort of benefit from growing up in a shittier world is it avoids the uncomfortable reality of our mortality, and the fact that we spent our best decades learning to exist in a world that changed too much for those skills to be valuable. Of course we know how to deal with a tyrannical asshole coach who thinks he's R. Lee Ermey. We also hated them so much that our generation made Varsity Blues, Friday Night Lights and The Program to tell everyone how bullshit it was the minute they let Gen X direct movies. We also made pap that glorified old coaches so we could feel good about ourselves. Some of them are even good flics. But this video is gross. The humor is "this is you: [whine whine whine]." Ask yourself this: If the object of the humor isn't going to find it humorous, what kind of humor is it?