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I wonder if the rules of war (Geneva convention) were less about humane treatment of soldiers and decency towards civilians and more about just determining a winner and a loser.

If you're in a war and your existence is at stake, you scratch and claw and do whatever fucked-up things you have to in order to survive.  But then whatever horrific things you do, the other side then does.  You wind up in a never-ending war where generations of men die or are maimed and it generally screws up your society for decades.  So even if you do survive the war, what was it for?  You don't have anything left to do anything with.

If war is an event with rules, it shortens it and allows at least one party to go on with a functional society.  And ideally, the losing side is folded into that society going forward....not ideally for them, but for the overall populations involved. 

functionality > civility
OR
functionality = civility

My grandfather was an expert on the laws of war. My understanding of the answer to this question: they were/are intended to minimize suffering for both combatants and non-combatants during state-on-state warfare, and essentially take the Clausewitz-ian perspective that war is an extension of politics/diplomacy. They were not created to give more powerful sides an upper hand. The Geneva Conventions flowed from the creation of the International Red Cross, following the Battle of Solferino in the mid 1800s. That stemmed from humanitarian concerns.

They also come from the perspective of rational actors who have decided that whatever the results on a battlefield should not extend beyond the battlefield. Even among countries that "follow" the laws of war, there are individuals who break them, and the self-policing is rarely as punitive as policing by a victor against a loser. The same grandfather--who was a combatant in WWII and Vietnam (he was stationed in Germany during the active fighting of the Korean War)--noted that there were certainly atrocities/war crimes that the US committed during WWII. Likewise, I never saw him more visibly upset than discussing My Lai (incidentally, he was involved on the Military Justice side, from a high level--and angry at the Nixon administration for how it let Calley off the hook). 

That said, desperate people do desperate things, and it is fairly safe to assume that combatants who view their survival (including the survival of their cause) as in the balance will be less inclined to follow the laws.

To your last point: every war ends. It is exceptionally rare (though maybe not nonexistent) that the end of war results in the eradication of the losing peoples.

Recently watched The Beast In Me on Netflix, with Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys.  

It was good, would recommend.  The ending was a bit vanilla after the superb slow-burn set-up the story created, but overall well-written with good acting.  As I say, I expected more of a twist at the end, or something crazy to match the tension the show built, but that probably speaks to how good the story arc was, that the ending seemed a little generic in comparison.  

Aikman seems like he passed his concussion limit years ago

On Monday Night Football, people have been saying for years that he looks and seems high. I think it's probably just repeated traumatic brain injury...

I've always thought of Jimmy Johnson as an asshat
I don't give him much credit a tall for the Herschel trade
much more credit goes to Viking's General Manager Mike Lynn

Mike Lynn certainly wasn't

I guess this is veering off-topic now, but it occurs to me in watching that documentary that over 50% of the hits/tackles they show in footage would be illegal today.  Part of me thinks that with constantly improving technology and understanding comes better training methods and better overall athletes, and that they would have a small but definite edge over athletes of that era.  The other part of me thinks those old skill guys had to put up with getting obliterated every play in a way that players today don't worry about, because the defense would all get flagged and ejected.  These guys today might have a real hard time adjusting to getting knocked around like guys like Rice and Irvin did. 

Really good point, I hadn't ever thought of that.

And players like Rice and Irvin probably wouldn't have appreciated the flying wedge and the resulting maiming and deaths it sometimes caused.

Yup.  It's easy to say that more modern football players and teams would be superior to past teams due to changing factors like improved nutrition, improved weight training, earlier and better position training and specialization, the overall increase in the physical size of people over the decades, and/or "natural selection" of superior physical specimens rising to the top of their sports.

But I'd never really thought about just how much rougher the game was for almost all positions, a couple of decades ago, or even decades before that.

I wonder if there's a peak to the physical violence enacted by football players, and if we're past it?  I could speculate that it would occur sometime around the point where the players were getting really big and really strong and really fast, but still allowed to hit like it's the 70s or 80s.