Some players turned broadcasters, like Don Meredith, were bubbly and charming. Others, like Tom Jackson, were mild-mannered and conservative. Many, like Joe Montana, were bland and uninformative. A few were almost monosyllabic. None were confrontational.

Times have changed, and today’s former player spouts criticism, even of former teammates, as if he were paid by the snap judgment. This new generation of talking heads subscribes to a bellicose corollary of Cartesian metaphysics: I rip, therefore I am.

Justin Tuck and Brandon Jacobs miss games because of injury, and their former Giants teammate Antonio Pierce diagnoses them from a radio studio, accusing them of “taking it easy.” Tony Romo throws three game-killing interceptions, and the former Cowboy Deion Sanders says that fans are sick of a quarterback whom they cannot trust. Chad Ochocinco compliments Tom Brady on Twitter, and the former Patriot Tedy Bruschi tells a Boston radio audience that Ochocinco must “drop the awe factor” and “get with the program.” Michael Vick complains about a possible late hit, and Trent Dilfer — during a television segment on Romo, not Vick — makes a sarcastic remark about quarterbacks who whine.

Gosh, gentlemen, tell us how you really feel.

The increasingly strident criticism parallels a trend toward louder, less congenial public debate on just about every topic, from politics to fashion.

“The volume factor on all opinion has increased,” said Gregg Easterbrook, an author and ESPN columnist. With dozens of talk shows and hundreds of hours of sports programming on television and radio each week, broadcasters are clamoring for attention. Gentle, soft-spoken remarks will probably be shouted down. “To make opinion more noticeable, you have to make it outrageous,” Easterbrook said.

But although the decibels have been ratcheting for decades, former players usually stayed above the fray, providing aw-shucks humor (Terry Bradshaw, Tony Siragusa), cool professionalism (Troy Aikman) or strategic fastidiousness (Ron Jaworski), but little controversy. The Pierce-Bruschi generation has apparently plunged headfirst into the deep end of confrontational analysis.

Michael Rosenstein, a producer at the NFL Network, said that programmers wanted former players to be opinionated, but not to be inflammatory for its own sake.

“The best opinions are the ones based on fact,” Rosenstein said, noting that he expects his on-air personalities to be able to back up their remarks with hard evidence, like video footage of on-field errors.

Rosenstein produces “Playbook,” a program that emphasizes football strategy. “Playbook” is produced midweek, so the on-air personalities have several days to digest news items and form their opinions. Therefore, the show rarely features the segments that Rosenstein calls “instant reactions” on events just a few minutes or hours old.

Still, “Playbook” has generated some controversy. When the analyst Sterling Sharpe accused receiver Brandon Marshall of tiring at the end of a game in 2010, telling Marshall to “give us more” and “bring it” in the future, Marshall fired back that the “Playbook” cast was just trying to “sound like they know what they are talking about.” The ensuing back-and-forth kept bloggers busy for days.

The Sharpe-Marshall incident illustrated how the blogosphere can make remarks sound more inflammatory than they really were. “Playbook” showed video of Marshall slowing down late in the game, and Sharpe’s comments were couched by positive remarks about Marshall’s talent and prior success. Stripped of the context and qualifiers, the straightforward criticism sounded more like a personal attack.

In many cases, though, the context does not soften the criticism. Dilfer changed the subject so he could take a broadside at Vick. Bruschi questioned Ochocinco’s work ethic and knowledge of the playbook based solely on a benign bit of cyberspace flotsam.

“Ochocinco has been pretty much invisible this season, but I don’t think it’s because he’s spending too much time on Twitter,” Bruce Allen of Boston Sports Media Watch said about Bruschi’s remarks. “But this was a raging topic for a week.”

In an atmosphere where potshots quickly escalate into raging topics, it is easy to perceive self-interest when an ex-player becomes hypercritical. Commentators can earn endorsement deals and improve their public profile by standing out from the crowd. With dozens of retired players looking for broadcasting jobs each year, someone unwilling to take a bold position can be easily replaced by someone who will.

There is also some basic psychology involved. Old players love to lionize the good old days, and Easterbrook noted that even classical philosophers had a habit of yearning for simpler times.

“If Plato were a broadcaster at the ancient Olympics, he would talk about how great the old athletes were, and how nobody knows how to throw a discus right anymore,” he said.

For a former athlete, criticizing current players is a form of self-flattery, even though the glory days for guys like Pierce and Bruschi date all the way to 2008.

For Rosenstein, harsh criticism is sometimes just the result of spontaneity and inexperience.

“You can craft an instant reaction so it’s grounded in fact,” he said. “But it takes a really experienced production staff.”

When forced to comment on a story that just broke, younger ex-athletes fall back on what they know — locker-room interactions — and may not always recognize how their remarks will be perceived. “They need to learn on the fly,” Rosenstein said.

The increasing demand for former athletes to fill the panels of an ever-growing roster of commentary and analysis programs ensures that more players will take to broadcasting and with a strong market incentive to be as controversial as possible.

“People want this,” Allen said. “They want the controversy, the backlash, the bashing of athletes. They cannot get enough of it.”

Viewers, meanwhile, are advised to interpret some of the snippier comments as neither locker-room wisdom nor personal attacks, but as simple byproducts of filling too many broadcast hours with too few topics on too accelerated a sports news cycle.

“The more hours of programming you have,” Easterbrook said, “the greater the chance that someone is going to say something dumb.”

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