1) My middle school kid is in cross country... all "school athletes" must attend district wide concussion class (they probably blew it off, after all it is CC not tackle football) and parents have to sign off that they've been given access to various concussion resources. Nobody found this overly unusual or interesting, its just part of athletics now. Soon it'll just be part of school athletics that football means touch not tackle or it means what we used to call soccer.
(For foreign readers cross country is hiking in the woods except you don't wear a pack and you run. So mile times are quite a bit lower than track and you're about a thousand times more likely to get heat exhaustion or twist your ankle than to get a concussion in that particular sport)
2) Look at average age of baseball fans, late 50s and that average has been going up more than one year per calendar year. There are generational trends and football may very well be a WW2/Boomer generation sport. Once "their" generations are gone, that's it.
Looking at demographics of the local pro basketball team I think we're more likely to see pro basketball go away before football ... volleyball is very popular and telegenic.
To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy), high-octane basketball is the natural substitute.
Meth or oxy? Interesting article, but I feel like it's, uh, brushing rural America in some very broad strokes.
That said, I found it interesting that it was discussing the collapse of sports TV in 2012. Just three years later I think we're inching closer and closer to that - the average cable subscription subsides ESPN when the majority of viewers don't watch it. With cable subscriptions declining, there is huge trouble ahead for ESPN, since they are tied into incredibly expensive multi-year contracts that they might find themselves unable to afford.
In totally unrelated news, ESPN shut down Grantland yesterday.
Of course, the rest of the world has a football-like sport (rugby--sorry, Australia) which suggests that there's a fair bit of demand for that general type of sport--and not just in the US. Rugby has its own issues with concussions although probably not as much as American football.
In general, I agree with the article that football isn't "too big to fail." I'm not sure lawsuits is so much the path though as kids simply not playing. That doesn't seem to be happening however.
I'm not sure lawsuits is so much the path though as kids simply not playing. That doesn't seem to be happening however.
True, though the broader demographic shift interests me - soccer is increasing in popularity for kids, given its popularity among hispanic populations. Presumably to the detriment of something, and I can believe it would be football.
What's interesting is that in Rugby you wear basically no protective gear, which is probably why it has less injuries. With a helmet and armour you feel much more invulnerable.
It is tackles above the shoulder (not waist) that are forbidden (along with striking an opponent with a stiff-arm whilst tackling, tripping, picking up and dropping a player etc.).
Fouls happen. I don't mean to diminish that, but when the base of the game is to disallow bad tackles then there will be far fewer incidents of bad tackling.
It's also that American football has a lot of downtime between the relatively short plays, whereas Rugby has a more constant style of play. An entire NFL game consists of roughly 11-12 minutes of actual gameplay -- the most recent numbers for rugby I could find put it at ~35 minutes. So, players are less fatigued and can hit harder and faster.
Pro players are grownups and can make their own decisions about life altering injuries. But I think we'll see the end of high school football very soon, when the lawsuits begin and school insurance steps in.
I predict we'll replace it with flag, touch, and rugby and that will be a further dig to the NFL.
But I think we'll see the end of high school football very soon, when the lawsuits begin and school insurance steps in.
It'll never happen. There's way too much community support for football. And thank god. There's no other sport out there that teaches you about life quite like football.
Ha! Football truly is so ridiculously complicated that I didn't even try to learn how it works, and still don't fully understand its absurdities.
Intuitively, as a child, I suspected that football was over rated based on the apparent reality that it was men running in circles, and then slamming into each other, without any obvious goal. Randomly a ball would be kicked for any reason, maybe.
I was 20 years old before I figured out that the basic rules of the game were 4 tries to move the ball 10 yards from the "line of scrimage" before the other team gets an opportunity to do the opposite. With this in mind add umpteen thousand technicalities.
More than a decade of elementary school, middle school, high school, video games, Thanksgivings and Super Bowl Sundays, and no one spelled that out for me. Not parents, not uncles, not coaches, not friends. I had to dig through a few books, before picking up some sort of For Dummies/Idiot's Guide book to find something that clearly stated that.
4 hours of TV time, to express one hour of clocked game play, in which almost no actual game playing happens. Bah! May as well watch golf.
Oh wait, already do. Yet another awful thing I have to watch at family gatherings.
You probably learned these lessons elsewhere, but I probably learned it earlier than you did and had it reinforced for 8 years (I started playing flag football when I was 8). The biggest lessons were teamwork and sacrifice. Football is unique in that it's the only sport in which all 11 players on the field have to all do their job at the same time or you lose. In every other sport, a single star or two can dominate the entire game and win for the entire team. In football, the quarterback gets his ass kicked if all 5 of his linemen don't block. A star linebacker can stop the run and short passes (if the defensive linemen do their job), but can't do anything for the sweep or long pass.
Football is also a good way to teach strategy. Unlike other sports where plays are limited due to the ongoing, chaotic nature of most sports, football stops after every play. You can sweep, pass, run up the middle, screen, option, etc. There are lots of options that may or may not work from one team to the next. You have to take a lot into account when coming up with a game plan, including the specific team you're playing. It's why coaches are so obsessive about going over game tapes. As my coach liked to point out, football is the only sport where you need an entire week to prepare between games.
And before everybody jumps on me about 'you can learn these lessons elsewhere/through video games', yes, they probably can. That doesn't negate the benefits kids get from playing football. I won't mention the health benefits you get because you get those from playing (just about) any sport.
Also, a funny anecdote, I only played 2 years of high school football before bailing. I played for 6 years for an independent organization called 'Pop Warner Football'. My coach for pop warner was an entrepreneur who owned and ran three concrete companies in three separate counties. He coached only because his son was playing. My high school coach had no idea what he was doing, which is why I didn't play my senior year.
If high school football got banned, I imagine Pop Warner will step in and pick up the slack, if they haven't already. Back when I stopped playing in the 90's, they had already expanded their program to compete with the Junior Varsity program. That's what I mean about football having too much support in the community. If the insurance premiums and lawsuits increase, they'll just have another bake sale.
Actually my non-football life mostly taught me that I hate teamwork and sacrifice; I burnt out on the animation industry in part because I wasn't interested in being a minor part of someone else's creative vision.
And as to strategy... funny, my choice in video games is really never about commanding a team and thinking about multiple characters and a tactical situation, I'd rather play a single entity.
There were bits of organized sports required in school of course, but my lack of enthusiasm for those games left me stuck out in the far boring edges of the field, which did little to increase my enthusiasm for any organized sports.
(Also I suspect that in the situation the original article describes, where football is the subject of a lot of legal action over concussions, organizations like Pop Warner would find themselves having major financial problems, and facing a growing social stigma against letting one's kids play The Brain Damage Game. Unless perhaps it became exclusively low-contact football.)
Had you been exposed to those concepts at an earlier age, maybe you would have more of an affinity for them. Maybe not. Also, one of the concepts exposed in football is leadership and hard work. I started at the age of 8 as a lineman. When I quit at the beginning of my Senior year, I would have been co-captain of the defensive backfield. Isn't the concept of meritocracy something we espouse in the startup field?
As for the brain damage scare, it'll pass. Soccer went through it a few years ago[0]. As for the concept of social stigma for playing football, I laugh. If you actually think a concussion scare 'all of a sudden' is going to sway communities with dozens of years of entrenched culture, you're living in a bubble.
[0]: high school soccer teams suffer more concussions than high school football teams do.
It doesn't need to include the brain scrambling hits, though, to have those benefits. Rugby has fewer brain injuries, for example, because who wants to bonk heads without helmets?
I don't understand the hard on people around here have for predicting the collapse of sports. It's like the very idea of getting revenge on the jocks makes you all salivate. Revenge of the nerds writ large? Or is it an extension of the 'toxic testosterone' propaganda?
1) My middle school kid is in cross country... all "school athletes" must attend district wide concussion class (they probably blew it off, after all it is CC not tackle football) and parents have to sign off that they've been given access to various concussion resources. Nobody found this overly unusual or interesting, its just part of athletics now. Soon it'll just be part of school athletics that football means touch not tackle or it means what we used to call soccer.
(For foreign readers cross country is hiking in the woods except you don't wear a pack and you run. So mile times are quite a bit lower than track and you're about a thousand times more likely to get heat exhaustion or twist your ankle than to get a concussion in that particular sport)
2) Look at average age of baseball fans, late 50s and that average has been going up more than one year per calendar year. There are generational trends and football may very well be a WW2/Boomer generation sport. Once "their" generations are gone, that's it.
Looking at demographics of the local pro basketball team I think we're more likely to see pro basketball go away before football ... volleyball is very popular and telegenic.