Yes. I would like to see American football replaced with a sport that does less damage to the players (and especially, which does less brain damage) but i think even replacing football is unlikely. Completely removing “sport that everyone follows” seems basically to be against human nature.
I’ll point out that American football is restricted to boys in school, and it gets vastly more funding than any of the sports that girls are eligible for. So i take a lot of the hand wringing about how important it is to support girls’ sports with some scepticism.
As a counterplan, I wonder whether putting more resources into intramural sports would help. Or not. To make this concrete, say we kept Varsity men’s and women’s tennis, closed JV tennis, and opened up 1 or 2 courts to anyone.
Honestly, I’m not sure there would be a lot of demand for that. But I’m also not sure there would be a lot of demand for a 3rd or 5th tier competitive team. At a basic level, I’m not sure why high school sports attract players even from mediocre teams, while interest in adult sports leagues is 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower. My guess is that people like succeeding in things, adults do that in their job, and teens to some extent do it in competitive sports. To the extent that is the case, 3rd or 4th level teams would have difficulty attracting interest, though they would provide opportunity to hang out with friends.
IOW, the stated goals of the current system may not be the qualities that support the current system. More research is necessary.