Football ,as popular as it is, a very barbaric sport.
Long term, do anyone think that it might eventually go away despite its current huge popularity. (Yes, I am well aware of the Super Bowl and the huge TV audiences)
Before you call me crazy, Boxing used to be a huge sport and now it is only a shadow of its former glory (replaced by MMA mostly)
Many people would consider Football too big to fail, but with these concussion problems, the short life of the typical NFL player, and the numerous injuries that many players have and the outrageous ticket prices, will this be the slow death of Football.
Or will the sport metamorphose into something that it a lot less brutal through various rule changes.
You might ask a mod to move this to the Game Room.
I think the concussion problems will have a major impact on middle and upper class participants, but not on the poor. Plenty of the poor are willing to sacrifice their health for the possibility of big bucks and high status. If the ticket prices were too high, people wouldn’t buy them.
I agree that poorer kids will try out, hoping for the remote chance of a big payout. Wealthy parents in football friendly regions will still send their sons to training camps and through the middle and high school programs as a sort of development course on how to work together and succeed in a team environment.
Professional football will continue. It long ago became a gladiatorial sport, where the fans have expectations of the players but don’t see the players and staff as people like themselves. *Someone *will play, and there will be plenty of people happy to sit around and watch, to vent on their team when it loses and to think that they are somehow a part of the success when their team wins
You mentioned boxing. Boxing is different in that in order to get good you have to be willing to have people hit you in the head and body on a regular basis. You hit in football, but it’s not as personal and you’re much less likely to get ribs broken or get your bell rung. Even the conditioning training is done at a higher intensity than football, and at least at the start boxers generally have to go out and do it without anyone else helping to keep them motivated.
It really seems to help to not have any other option, which is why I think that boxing has been on the wane in the US for decades, and the contenders from recent years past were coming from Southeast Asia and the former USSR – at least that’s one uneducated opinion.
Miners, loggers, farmers, roofers, police officers, firemen, fishermen, framers, brick layers, factory workers and construction workers, all seem to keep going to work for $40k to $60k a year. They all watch football.
Maybe cubicle workers kids won’t play but who really cares.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about society, it’s that what seems normal will be regarded as normal even as we are shocked and appalled at things that are far less unsafe but not mainstream. UFC could only hold events in southern states for quite some time, even though it was safer than football or boxing. Football will remain, although efforts are being made to make it safer and I expect those efforts will continue.
In a couple hundred years virtual reality might be so great that all play might take place in the virtual world where no one can get hurt(except emotionally).
Of course, we also have tournaments in the virtual world that involve people shooting each other with large calibre weapons, or cutting each other up with chainsaws. Football will be wholesome entertainment by comparison.
I’m not a big sports fan but I think the game can change to make it safer. Remember that when Theodore Roosevelt was president, football was reformed to make it less deadly. So perhaps today, the game can be changed to reduce tackling.
I don’t know much about rugby but deaths used to be fairly common in college football before the sport was reformed (there was no pro football back then). In 1905, for example 20 players died from injuries suffered on the field.
Deaths still happen today. An average of 5 high school school football players die from direct injuries every year and more from indirect injuries because of things like heat stroke during practice.
First, the issue isn’t really concussions, per-se. It’s the accumulated injury of thousands of sub-concussive hits- exactly the kind that linemen and linebackers suffer every play. Concussions are like an extra bad version of this, but plenty of players diagnosed post-mortem with CTE were not in positions that typically suffer a lot of concussions, like offensive linemen, for example. CTE is also what’s suffered by a lot of retired boxers… for the same reasons.
Personally, what I think’s going to happen is that there’ll be a series of lawsuits, or maybe just the threat of lawsuits against the NFL, AND various colleges/NCAA/conferences for CTE-related damages.
In an effort to avoid liability, they’ll change the on-field rules and equipment rules up tout suite to lessen the likelihood of CTE, while trying to keep the game substantially the same.
Personally, I think it’s a matter of time before the NFL gets nailed with a second, bigger suit from former players- I have a feeling that the settlement isn’t going to be found as ironclad as previously thought- someone will find a way to make them extraordinarily liable. Whether or not this happens before or after the colleges get skittish, I’m not sure.
The big question is whether or not all this will happen before football becomes unattractive to anyone but the poor/minority groups at the grassroots level (middle school/high school). If that happens before the rule changes, then I think it’ll end up entirely a sport played by the poor, but if the rule changes happen first, it may not come to pass, and football may remain a sport of the middle class as well.
No, it isn’t. Unlike boxing (or, I guess, bullfighting), violence is incidental to the game; it’s not the point. At least in theory, no one needs to get hurt to have a good game of football. The question is how safe it can be made in practice.
The NFL could always adopt some CFL rules, like 3 downs instead of 4. Much more passing. I’m presuming that less of a running game would result in less tackling injuries.