Kliff Kingsbury joins the NFL has a young hotshot coach from college. While at Texas Tech he might have not won very many games, but he brought a philosophy of young fresh ideas with his exciting, up-tempo offense. Now with the Cardinals, there’s a hope he’ll be able to inject some of that young energy into the sometimes old and crotchety NFL.
One way Kingsbury is going to try and bring some youth to his Arizona roster is by embracing an object that every young person is attached to almost religiously. Their phone. Kingsbury knows that it’s just not easy maintaining the attention span of people in today’s digital age. So instead of settling for super long meetings, his idea is to give players a little cell phone break.
Kingsbury will let the players break for their phones every 20 or 30 minutes — what he called a “good run” — right around the time he usually starts to see players lose interest.
“You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking, and you know they need to get that social media fix, so we’ll let them hop over there and then get back in the meeting and refocus,” Kingsbury said.
An idea like this will definitely rub a few older fans the wrong way, but the idea is sound on Kingsbury’s part. This is not a young person only problem. Ever since the introduction of cell phones, everybody’s attention span has just generally gone down. Instead of fighting that and having his players zone out on him it will be more beneficial to give his players a slight break in these meetings. After all. A focused team is a good one.
Having a young coach like Kingsbury should be good for not only the Cardinals, but the NFL as a whole. The NFL has been steadily getting younger with it becoming more viable for teams to keep younger and fresher players on cheaper contracts than spending big on potentially aging veterans. This makes some of the old ways a little outdated with younger locker rooms. Having someone like Kingsbury that can connect with young people theoretically should lead to success. Of course, that’s merely off the field. If he doesn’t win on the field then none of this will matter.
