First Patrick Willis and now this guy retiring from the N.F.L. well short of their 30th birthdays. With concussion awareness on the rise do you think that the all-mighty N.F.L. will eventually meet its end if players like these just decide, at any early age, to say “¡No más!” to playing (American) football anymore?
There are and will continue to be many many more players willing to fill in.
Long term, perhaps. If either of my sons ever shows any interest in going out for football, I’ll do my best to talk him out of it, specifically because of the risk of head injuries.
I’ve heard too damn many stories of former football players dying at around 50-60 years old.
There’s a tweet from Adam Shefter that says:
Anyone worried about the future of football should see the amount of calls and emails we get from kids literally begging to get into pro days
I’m sure it’s fine
I think it’s gonna take awhile for the NFL to feel any pain. Still, I wouldn’t have expected instances of NFL players proactively quitting on this account nearly so soon. That’s gonna have some ripples.
Fore ever player retiring early, there are probably a hundred who will do what it takes for the paycheck.
Well, sure. A couple of NFL players deciding that the risk of permanent brain injury outweighs the obvious benefits of NFL success isn’t like Gollum falling into the Cracks of Doom with the Ring. The whole football industry doesn’t just fall apart at once.
This was what the guy they were interviewing on NPR this morning was saying: you’ve got tons of colleges feeding players into the NFL; these guys are totally replaceable.
And for right now, he’s 100% correct. Hell, ten years from now, that will still be true. The FBS (Division 1-A) in 2025 will probably be about the same size as it is now; it’ll manage that long on sheer momentum.
But the supply of fresh bodies isn’t the existential threat to big-time football (NFL and FBS). It’s its perceived legitimacy as a form of entertainment. Up until recently, there’d been no reason to question that. But increasingly, people are doing so. And these retirements keep that conversation going, keep people thinking about that. And that’s why the NFL won’t be as popular in 2025 as it is now.
Concerns about concussions & other head injuries aren’t going to go away, particularly when it comes to kids. Somewhere down the line (like, 20 years from now) it could be that the high school/college recruitment system has declined to the point where the NFL needs to hold open tryouts to recruit players. But the present system will survive at least a couple of decades on pure momentum.
I wouldn’t want my 11 year old son to play football either, but the stories of football players dying young are just that- “stories.”
I often see magazine articles saying things like, “The average NFL player dies at 55,” but I have yet to see any real study that shows any such thing. Most of the Packers who played in the first Super Bowl are alive and well.
I do think football may eventually die out in the affluent white suburbs where it’s still played, but it will remain extremely popular among blacks and all over the South.
I think it’s going to end up like boxing, something that still exists, but which is more niche and vaguely unsavory. The decline will start slowly, but at some point it will reach a tipping point and then drop off sharply.
“Football is too dangerous! We need to stop playing! Cancel the '15 Cal-Stanford game!”
In fact, the '15 game was cancelled as one school replaced football with the much less dangerous rugby - that is, the 1915 game.
There is nothing new about people talking about the demise of football because of the safety factor. The NFL is not going anywhere. However, I do think there will be significant changes in the rules of football and/or the equipment at some point to address the safety (not to mention the cost) issues.
If anything is going to destroy the NFL, it will be the excessive salaries and resulting excessive cost to go to, or even watch on TV, a game.
Price is a function of demand. NFL salaries are fixed as a percentage of revenues. Revenues can be adjusted if demand decreases and teams can remain profitable.
Public perception and labor supply are the long term threats to football and even they may not be enough to destroy it. Too many people love them some football and are quite comfortable looking the other way as it chews through its labor pool.
Willis retired because of a nagging toe injury, not a concussion. Most players careers end prior to their 30th birthdays.
I think the NFL’s problems as it relates to this issue will be more a function of having to over-rely on the the corporate and team brands as opposed to the players. The issue is that the NFL is going to have fewer and fewer non-QB stars to market as fewer people play and the game makes more and more former marquee positions less central to the game.
Even now, running backs are basically interchangeable, there are only maybe a dozen QBs that are actually competent, and the average player is only gonna have a 3 or so year career on average. The amount of investment and opportunity costs of getting on the NFL player track are just becoming too much to justify.
Additionally, the NFL is too reliant on TV revenues (which are likely near their peak), and they have too little product (no room to expand teams or number of games). Lastly, the NFL is incredibly poorly run. I think they will still be the biggest sports league for a while, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the NBA surpass them some time in the next 20 years or so.
It survived Barry Sanders and Jim Brown leaving early, it will survive this.
Only in the sense that it happened once or twice before, well before most of us were alive.
This is the first time in 50 years there’s been any serious talk about safety issues being a threat to the sport’s existence. (50 years ago, football’s big issue was that upstart AFL, enabled by football’s increasing popularity.) So for all practical purposes, yes, it’s new.
May every company that I invest in be as poorly run as the NFL.
You do know that they’ve never made a profit, right?
But somehow every owner who sells a franchise gets a lot more than he paid for it.
Cite?