The chance of it going away at the professional, or even the collegiate, level is zero. At collegiate level, it will always be associated with the schools, as otherwise it probably would have been replaced with campus-area-based teams (e.g. the “Columbus Buckeyes” and the “South Bend Fighting Irish”), which, among other things, would get rid of all of the problems associated with the NCAA, as well as a few Title IX-based ones as well. In part because of this, and what the players can do at “the next level,” professional football will continue as well.
High school football may become virtually extinct in a number of states, but a lot of schools probably have no business fielding teams in the first place; also, quite a few schools have pretty much everything specifically football-related paid for by the players’ parents and assorted “boosters” (through fundraising and the cost of tickets to the games - where I live, I think it’s $6 for an adult to get into a typical high school football game).
The libertarian side of me says that you shouldn’t ban or restrict American football that much even though it is widely acknowledged that it is a brutal sport. A player at my daughter’s high school took a bad hit a few years ago, walked off the field and then collapsed a few minutes later. Even though they had an ambulance and medical crew right there, he didn’t even make it to the hospital a few miles away before he was gone for good. Something similar happened to one of my father’s teammates in Louisiana. He took an unremarkable hit that left him permanently paralyzed.
You don’t usually see that at the college or professional level but a football player at Tulane, my alma mater, was permanently paralyzed a few years ago as well. Professional football players don’t often get paralyzed or killed because they are too well conditioned and trained but they do get badly injured and cumulative injuries are inevitable due to the nature of the sport. Professional players are so big, strong and fast these days that their internal organs cannot keep up with the collisions that their external physique is putting them through.
It is fun to watch but two or more 230+ pound men running at near Olympic speeds isn’t going to work out well for them when they are well-trained to instantly drop one another through targeted tackling techniques. The human body is not designed to withstand that type of trauma repeatedly.
That said, different players take it differently. Most players only last a couple of years but you also have people like Tom Brady that claim he wants to play until he is 50 and seems rather healthy. OTOH, Paton Manning may have been a great quarterback but he let the game destroy his body and will probably be lucky to even walk without painkillers in a few years if that isn’t the case now.
I don’t think so. The worst hits are open field hits. That’s one reason they’ve tried to reduce kickoff returns. Passing plays probably have a lot more open field hits than rushing plays. Some of the worst ones are when a receiver is hit while jumping for the ball.
People still watch boxing, MMA, and pro wrestling (which isn’t even a real sport), so football is gonna stay in some form or another. It’s too ingrained in the culture now.
Plus the sense I’m getting that there are fewer competitive team sports free of CTE concerns than most people think. Maybe all of them would be better off examining their games across the board.
ETA: Actually, I think Dave Mirra had it too, so maybe you don’t even need an opponent…