All Things Considered, These Fellas At Winston Salem University Are Doing A Heckuva Job Spray Painting The Yardage Lines Onto Their Football Field
There's a saying that "football is a game of inches". That the inches we need are everywhere around us. That you tear yourselves and everyone else around you for that inch. And when you add up those inches, that's gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing.
But at the end of the day, what even is an inch? Just some arbitrary measurement of length that humans came up with a thousand years ago? For hundreds of years, it used to be that 1 inch was equal to 3 barleycorns. What the fuck is a barleycorn? It's a literal grain of barley. You used to take 3 of those together to make an inch. Doesn't sound very specific now does it? But that's what made up an inch. So if you really think about it, football is a game of barleycorns.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the yards are actually irrelevant. You got these guys at Winston Salem University just eyeballing where the yardage markers should go. Looks close enough to me. Maybe the 36 to the 46-yard lines is actually 10.5 yards. Maybe you get luck and start a drive from your own 39, and it turns out that going to the 49 is only actually 9 yards.
The point of the game is still to get the ball into the end zone, is it not? Yeah maybe you'd like the measurements on the field to be a little more precise and exact. But who gives a rats ass if the 23-yard line is a little off if you can't find a way to get the ball into the end zone anyway.
Sidenote: That 46-yard line being like 8 inches away from the 45-yard line is a tough one to swallow. I'm sure they wished they had that one back.