Reminds me of the time, in my mid-20's, when I joined a men's flag football team. Now, just to put this in perspective, I considered myself to be a pretty decent athlete. Not D-1 or anything, but I played D-3 hoops, as well as baseball growing up, and at the time that I joined this league, was pretty active in things like softball, rec hoops, as well as both indoor and sand volleyball. And, in college, a few of the basketball players had put a couple of intramural flag football teams together, and we did OK. Not world beaters, but we held our own against MOST of the other teams.
Back to me in my mid-20's. Long story short, about 15 guys who were mostly in the same boat (some more athletic than others, but we all had some sports background, whether it be rec/HS/college) decided that we would put a team together. A couple of guys had been pretty solid high school football players, and the rest of us had played more than our share of, at the very least, some form of football (even if that was just playing for hours on end with neighbor kids and my brothers growing up).
Well, it was an eye-opening experience, to say the least. Let me just put it this way. We found out pretty quickly that there were three types of teams. 1) Teams like ours. Mostly athletic/formerly athletic guys who just assumed that, because they had played football before, they would be able to compete in organized flag football. 2) Teams that had obviously played together for a while. They weren't necessarily any bigger, faster, or stronger than we were, but you could just tell by the plays that they ran that they had put some time and thought into how to run a flag football offense. That might sound silly, but it's a different animal. Short, crisp plays designed to get the ball out of the QB's hands in 1-2 seconds tops. Nothing deep, for the most part. And, guys just played their part. Quick guys move the ball and make the "tackles," and the bigger guys just knew how to effectively block for that 1-2 seconds to spring someone free. 3) The third group was really just one team. There was a professional arena football team that had joined the league, just for the sake of something to do in their off-season.
There weren't many teams like ours. If I had to guess, I'd say there were one or two other teams that we competed with pretty well. Teams in the #2 category ran circles around us. Where we were scoring maybe a TD or two per game, they were scoring on every drive EXCEPT maybe one or two. Not devastating blowouts, but not close games either. 34-12, 24-6, etc. As for the pro arena team, I've never experienced that type of humiliation in an athletic event in my life. The closest I can think of is playing in an AAU tournament in Vegas when I was 17. We played a team from Dallas that probably had 25-30 dunks against us in one game. That was both frustrating and amazing at the same time. This might have been worse. I think they had six touchdowns before we completed a pass. At one point, somebody on our team commented that we had thrown more pick-six's than completions. I think that was mid-3rd quarter.
I only bring this up because, when I think back to playing against that team, there is zero question in my mind that, while I can throw a football, I would stand no chance of racking up 150 yards against ANY NFL defense. They're just too good. They would literally toy with us and make it a game of who could pick one off and take it to the house. And, by game's end, at least a handful of them would have done so. It would get ugly, for sure.
Just think about when Denver had to have a 5th string WR play QB a couple of years ago during Covid. What did that guy complete? Ten passes? Maybe less? Most of us would be 100 times worse than that, whatever that amounts to.
