I guess we differ on skill.  Sure high tech cores have had an impact on the game, but give everyone pancake weight blocks and it would still be about creating revs.  Overall rev rates would decrease incrementally because of higher rg cores, but the guys with the most revs who can keep the ball in play would still dominate. 

As you change the motion from throwing straight, to throwing revs, you have to work harder to maintain the same level of accuracy.

Wouldn't you call someone who can achieve the same level of accuracy, while also achieving an increased angle of entry more skillful?

I have an old xxxl polyester ball with a low rg 2 piece core.  I can rev it up more than a target zone, but it is just as helpless on a high volume of oil.  Want to compare it to a car?  My arm swing is the motor, the core is the transmission, and the shell is the tire.  Put me on glare ice ( heavy oil ) and the strength of the motor or the gear ratio of the transmission has no effect if the tires don't have studs. 

I sense that your definition of "rev it up" is quite different than mine.

When I was in my 20's, before they came out with short oil, my rev rate was 600+ with the goal of reducing the slippage as much as possible as the ball exit the oil.

I release the ball at about 16 mph so I was very close to the rolling rev rate right away.

Due to the hard surface of the ball (hard rubber, or plastic) the ball wouldn't hook early.

There was a practical limit as to how much force you could inflict onto the head pin while also obtaining an effective angle of entry.

To increase angle of entry, you had to reduce speed to allow the low friction ball time to build up cross lane momentum.

If you lower the speed, you lower the force applied to the head pin.

If you lower the cross lane momentum, you lower the force.

To get the most out of the shot, you had to balance speed and revolutions.

Good young bowlers today are way more skilled than bowlers 25 years ago.  Because they use different techniques to attack the environment does not diminish the skill level.   We get too pre occupied with score.  Critics go ballistic because guys in league average 230 just like the pros.  Well guess what. In 1975 I averaged as much in league as Mark Roth did on tour, and I wasn't high in my league.  It has always been that way.     

I don't think the "good young bowlers" today are "way more skilled".

With the modern balls (super high friction) creating cross lane momentum is much easier, and can be done at much higher speeds.

With longer oil patterns, it's much easier to get that cross lane momentum to occur down by the pins.

With flaring ball peeling oil off the lane, the bowlers can cause areas of the lane that were intended to have oil on them to become dry, and act like a bumper for errant shots.

On a THS, the bowlers don't need to create the bumper, the lane man does it for them.

So no, I don't see the young bowlers being more skillful.

If anything, they are stronger because the current game rewards an increase in ball speed, even at the expense of accuracy.


When they take a 40' pattern, and cut it back to 35', most of these "skilled" bowlers have trouble keeping the ball on line.

I guess that indicates that keeping the ball on line isn't something they are more skillful at.

An oil pattern should magnify everyone's weakness, not mask them.

That ways the guy with the fewest weakness tends to score the highest.

High rev players score better on long oil because the balls themselves blow up the patterns so quickly with their aggressive surfaces and high rev rates.  The cranker game came to prominence with the advent of short oil patterns and the trend to stripping the back ends as a means to combat carrydown in the 80's. 

I am not talking about Joe Sixpack tearing the cover off the ball in the Thursday night commercial league, but the elite level of amatuers and pros.  They are creating a great amount of revs with much lower axis rotations than in the past.  See Sean Rash as an example.  The point is that high revs and high speed have been combined to allow top players to not have to go coast to coast.  The straighter you can throw the ball without reducing the rev rate the better you can play flatter patterns without sacrificing carry. 

Bottom line high rev players will dominate the game so long as there is enough friction out their to allow them to throw hard and still get strong recovery.