Boxing (and, for that matter, MMA, which now seems to be far more popular than boxing is) is an individual sport, not a team sport. You don’t need thousands of high-level professionals in boxing, or in MMA, for the sport to do well from a fan standpoint. And, a large number of the participants in the sport (at least in boxing; I know very little about MMA) aren’t from the U.S.
Even if there isn’t organized, interscholastic boxing or MMA at the high school or college level, I suspect that most boxers and martial artists aren’t suddenly picking up the sport at age 20 or 22…many of them are probably starting into the sport (or other martial arts) when they’re teenagers.
When I say that the NFL would suffer if there wasn’t high school football, what I’m saying is not that high school football, in and of itself, is needed for creating future NFL players – it’s that you need to have something in which large numbers of teenaged boys are playing football. And, if large numbers of parents start to prevent their sons from playing, it doesn’t matter if there are non-scholastic options for playing football or not. A lack of football players at age 18 or 22 is a lack of those players, period.
The NFL, as it exists today, requires nearly 1700 players on a weekly basis (53 man roster, times 32 teams). Add in injury replacements, mid-season pickups, etc., and you’re probably looking at 2000 players or more in a year (not to mention an additional 1000 or more who participate in training camp), nearly all of whom are from the US, and nearly all of whom played football throughout both high school and college.
Agreed. Amateur & youth boxing in the US is a lot more organized than PastTense seems to know. See Golden Gloves - Wikipedia. In poorer parts of many cities, boxing is an organized school sport. Just as organized high school golf is not rare in expensive upscale suburbs.
Neither sport is on nearly the scale of organized football, but they’re both still present. And as kenobi_65 says, the professional demand for skilled boxers (& golfers) is small compared to NFL.
On the football front we may see some schools pull away from sponsoring football teams after the next highly publicized very expensive lawsuit over a player’s death or injury. School districts, with their governmentally deep pockets make a nearly ideal lawsuit magnet. Which makes administrators particularly risk-averse.
There is a widespread and popular US youth amateur football league: http://www.popwarner.com/. Right now they mostly cater to younger kids since high schools pretty universally offer football. But as high schools pull away, Pop Warner could easily expand into that niche.
In an alternative outcome Pop Warner could go the other way, destroyed by the same parental concerns that may strangle high school football. IMO watching the relative advance or decline of PW vs. HS football will give us the canary in the coal mine. If PW starts dying out from the young end, HS will be deeply affected by 8 to 10 years later and the NFL 6 to 10 years after that. If not; not.
The punchline here being that the NFL has a large and varied feeder root system. NFL may contract, but it won’t die for lack of players until almost all the various tendrils of the roots themselves go dead.
I also think we can safely assume that parental refusal to countenance youth football in its present form will grow from the rich end of the SES first. The fancy set is already playing lacrosse. Poor kids in hardscrabble towns or urban areas will be the last to see football go.
If indeed it does go. Football will live or die based on a developing viral social attitude toward injury risk, most notably CTE risk. Which might spin up either way at any time for no identifiable reason.
College ball may disappear first. It’s pretty exploitative as it is: adding “you are doing irreparable damage to your brain” on top of all the other issues and a lot of people might start deciding that a scholarship isn’t worth the cost.
I wonder how much the pool of potential pro players has to sink before the quality of the game play decreases?
There is another possibility: that fans will simply find a lower level of play than currently exists acceptable, and a new equilibrium is established based on whatever the new standards of “entertaining football” become.
Lots of US folks already prefer watching college football over pro football. College ball, even top-ranked college ball, is significantly less skillful than pro ball.
I used to attend football games of a small local college. They were part of a bush league of a dozen-ish Nowheresville Colleges spread around the central Midwest. They were several notches below the bottom of the NCAA system.
They played very entertaining high energy football. It was real accident-prone, but frankly watching the broken plays and the teams’ ad libbed recoveries of whatever mistaken hijinks just happened was lots of fun. An NFL purist would scoff mightily at the crappy play. But it was still plenty fun to watch once you got your mind right about what to expect. The best part was the $5 tickets, the stands full of college girls, and free parking at most 50 yards from the gate. Let’s see you top that, NFL. I dare ya.
IMO NFL can survive being less skillful. What they can’t survive without major rework is being less popular. If their TV & in-person audience collapsed to NHL levels they’d go broke unless they learned real fast how to be real lean.
The book Tackling Rugby Tackling Rugby – Verso has some sobering arguments about the dangers of rugby. Would also add that the “choice” many boxers and football players make is often bounded by poverty and few options. If you want to calculate how informed and free those choices are, we can construct a pretty simple experiment by offering them remedial education and training and decent jobs and see how many still decide to choose to spin the wheel.
Two years ago, I worked as scorekeeper and assistant statistician for a minor-league arena football team. Definitely a low-rent operation, playing in an indoor soccer arena in suburban Chicago, in front of a few hundred fans. Most of their players were from Division II and III college football programs; a few were from Division I, and they were clearly far more talented than most of the others on the field. Yes, sometimes sloppy, but usually entertaining.
Anecdotally, I have several friends who don’t follow football nearly as much as they did just a few years ago, and the concussion / CTE issue is one reason why. NFL ratings have been down for a couple of seasons, though there are a number of other possible factors going on (last year’s election, this year’s hurricanes, some fans annoyed by the National Anthem protests). The next few years will be very interesting.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the total number of kids playing football in high school and college dropped by a factor of 10.
But fans still want to watch NFL football, and viewership is about the same. So the NFL is having to recruit from a 10 times smaller pool.
Would the couch experience of football fans actually be any worse if 10 times less people were trying to become professional football players? Let’s assume that the 1/10 who remain are a slice of people with the same average talent as before. And the NFL does pick the best from that slice, but now the new players are objectively worse on average. They are all a little slower, all a little worse in every way.
But their competition - the other players on the field - are also worse.
Can you, as a fan, even tell the difference? If the superstar QB needs a little more time to make an accurate pass, but the defensive players are less good at sacking, it evens out. If the QB throws passes that are easier to intercept, but the average player is less good at making interceptions, it evens out. And so on.
Everyone’s stats versus each other are relative, anyway.
Same argument goes if there were 100 times less players. It just means that the college players who do risk the concussions have dramatically better chances of making it to the NFL.
So there are 25,000 NCAA players, and a 7% chance of getting drafted. If 10 times less people wanted to play college football, it would mean a 70% chance of getting drafted. Those are the kind of odds it is worth risking brain injuries for.
We also used to attend local low-budget arena football. It was/is definitely a different game than field football, but (dumb) fun nonetheless. And as you say, talent on each team varied wildly.
The absolute most lopsided game we ever watched ended at about 70 to 3. About halfway through the game we figured out why. The low-scoring team only had about half a roster and so the same players were playing both O & D and never got a break. They were exhausted but played their hearts out. Then all went to work at their day jobs the next day.
Anecdotally, I watched only a couple of NFL games last year and last attended in person 6 years ago. I’ve yet to actually sit down to watch a game this year. I do pay some attention to the snips of games I happen to see in sports bars. Just not that interested. If pressed I could claim that CTE plays a role in my growing disinterest. But that’d probably be at least as much BS as truth. Off-field thuggism is probably a bigger factor.
As a separate matter, the ever more frantic efforts by NFL (& MLB & AB Inbev) to wrap themselves in the flag are far more of a turnoff than any kerfuffle about national anthem protests. IMO jingoism is very off-putting. I suppose my age is starting to show along with my scalp.
I’m another anecdata point of that sort. Rooted for the Redskins for over 40 years, through Lombardi, George Allen, Jack Pardee, both Joe Gibbs eras, Petitbon, Spurrier, etc., but when I found out about CTE a few years back, that was the end of my football fandom.
Once you realize that you’re watching the players’ brains being slowly turned into a horrible mush, it’s hard to keep on watching. Football, like any sporting activity, is supposed to be entertainment, and that’s not a very entertaining thought.
I think the main reason is something that Mark Cuban predicted a few years ago: NFL is on all the time. It’s gotten to be too big. I miss the anticipation of games on Sunday, with Monday Night Football to follow. I also think the league has become too star driven, particularly since the rise of fantasy football. Fans these days care a lot about how individual players perform than how teams perform.
The one thing I didn’t like about the CTE scandal was how slimy the corporate world of big time football turned out to be. The NFL is no better than Philip Morris.
I think I will continue to watch football even if it remains a violent game, which it most likely will. But I would hope that there are some steps taken in recent years that really place a higher priority on the welfare of the players after football. There needs to be some sort of agreement on medical testing, especially on the brain but also on joints, ligaments, arthritic risks, etc. It’s pretty sad to realize that a guy like Jim Plunkett now can barely climb stairs.
I mean, to be fair, aren’t the people in their la-z-boys chugging beer after beer and watching football all weekend doing at least as much damage to their brains, collectively? Why aren’t they all working on something useful?
To be fair, keeping AB Inbev and Barcalounger in business *is *something useful. They’re doing their bit to keep US factory employment up. It’s hard work, but NFL fans are glad to pitch right in.
Are you old enough to remember the 1987 NFL strike? The NFL played 3 games without nearly all of their regular players (save for a few who crossed the picket lines), instead fielding teams composed of new players who were willing to also cross the picket lines. Fans complained about the poorer quality of play, though that was (a) a situation in which team’s entire rosters were replaced with inferior players overnight, and (b) fans knew that they were seeing inferior players. So, even if the quality of play wasn’t actually any worse, fans were sensitized to it, and “saw” it.
If the quality of NFL players just gradually declines, it could be a “boiling a frog” sort of thing; maybe fans don’t really see it, because it doesn’t happen overnight.
On the other hand, while you’re right that, to an extent, the players’ performances are relative to each other, what you likely would lose are the displays of individual skill – the quarterback who can drop a 50-yard spiral directly into his receiver’s hands, the running back who nearly never fumbles, the kicker who makes nearly every extra point, the center who nearly never botches a snap exchange, etc. Those sorts of things aren’t relative to the other players on the field, and could well be noticeable to an experienced, observant fan.
I actually thing the opposite would happen. If the NFL has a smaller talent pool to pick from, they would end up having to take a lot of mediocre players. But there would be a few players who are just as good as the best players are today, and they’d be dominant. Kind of how in college football, some superstars play like they are in the NFL already and everyone else on the field is just a redshirt. I remember one Rose bowl game around 2005 (I am not a football fan, it was at someone’s house) where a ‘triple-threat’ player, the team’s QB, was on fourth down and decided to just get it done himself and he ninja jukes past all the defenders trying to stop him. This was the conclusion of a game full of dominant plays by the player, where he and the superstar on the opposing team were basically playing 1 v 1, and everyone else was just background.
It might be more interesting if there were more superstars. Today, if every athlete is near the limits of human performance anyways, nobody can stand out by as large of a factor.
Football’s always been a violent game, but before CTE, the risks have always been visible. It’s reasonable for an adult to say, “I’ll trade my ability to climb stairs when I’m 65 for a chance at a few years of glory.”
But the brain damage thing is a whole different kind of tradeoff. It’s both harder to see and far more serious. Being barely able to walk is one thing; losing your very self makes that look trivial by comparison. My father-in-law can barely walk, and I’m sure he can’t do stairs anymore. But he’s still got his own self, and so does Jim Plunkett. But players who’ve been seriously afflicted by CTE, they really don’t anymore. It’s pretty horrible shit.
Absolutely agreed. What makes it even more horrible, for the former players who are now developing it, is that the NFL downplayed the risks for years, and actively fought against the doctors and scientists, like Bennet Omalu, who were trying to uncover the problem.
So, we have thousands of former NFL players (as well as those who only played the game in college or high school) who are now developing cognitive problems, or will in the future, and had no idea, at the time that they played, that choosing to play football likely elevated their risk to develop these problems.
