The unionization issue might affect football the most, but the whole concept of amateurism in college sports is going to change in big ways over the next few years.
I doubt it. George Carlin described lacrosse best, and that perception is why it’ll never be universally popular in the US.
If anything’s going to usurp football’s crown, it’ll be soccer, but football would just about have to die for that to happen.
Here is a study that states that the 6 month break between football seasons isn’t long enough to give players enough time to recover from the head impacts they receive:
College football players received between 431 and 1,850 impacts to the head during the regular season. Wow!
With all the talk (and seeming concern) about concussions I was thinking that football might be on its way out, too (although I concede that I didn’t think it would happen overnight, if it were to happen at all). Will this: New helmet technology could lead to fewer concussions put a dent in such fears?
Well my kid won’t play football, probably much to his grandfather’s disappointment.
I think lacrosse is getting more popular in the midwest, though it is MUCH bigger in the NE.
My ex MIL (who, granted, was from a pretty well-off family) was shocked that we don’t really have lacrosse or crew here. Can you imagine!
While football might disappear in a distant future, like boxing it will still have its fans and it will still draw crowds. People will simply sign waivers which abrogate the responsibilities of institutions so their children can play football or the kids won’t play.
Think that they won’t do that?
There are many places where a football scholarship and the dream of possibly playing pro ball are so great that they would overwhelm all but the most rational of parents (and kids for that matter) and allow them to risk potential permanent injury for a chance at the brass ring. After all, tearing up shoulders and knees are far more common and those debilitating and lifelong injuries haven’t even slowed the game down.
It’s likely that the NFL will bite the bullet and go for an expensive settlement to make the concussion issue “go away.” Not to be crude, but for the players to have any benefit from litigation during their lifetimes, they’d have to settle relatively soon. Drawn-out court proceedings will leave fewer defendants to settle with.
As far as the unionization ruling, the NCAA will have to throw their players a bone or risk losing an expensive series of court battles and being forced to do so. While I don’t foresee college players making huge salaries, I do see colleges offering them wages to play and changing the rules to accommodate the new realities. The lesser interest/lower revenue sports will have to satisfy themselves with earning lower salaries or risk having their programs simply dropped.
Schools which aren’t football powers now and which have no winning traditions of football might end their participation. But that will simply mean that money will flow to the schools which retain their programs and the athletic programs at the otehr schools will be affected accordingly.
“The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.”
“Nearly a third”? This is vastly higher that I would have expected.
That’s one shitload of brain damage, just to give us an entertaining way to spend our fall weekends. Seriously, how can one justify being a fan anymore?
The notion that people were permanently messing up their bodies in the course of playing pro football was a whole ‘nother thing. That unfortunately happens all the time in many less remunerative occupations. But I realized a few years ago (thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ raising the issue in his blog) that I couldn’t possibly look at a TV screen and say, “those people are running a real risk of serious brain damage in order to keep me entertained, and I’m perfectly good with that.”
According to other articles I’ve read, this means they’re expecting the retired players to suffer those diseases at about double the rate of the general population - and they expect them to be stricken at earlier ages, too. It took me a while to come to grips a conclusion after Junior Seau died, but no, this isn’t fun anymore. I didn’t watch a lot of football starting at about midseason, partly because I was just busy, but the excitement of watching football doesn’t come close to balancing out the awful truth of what is going to become of the guys on the field a couple of decades down the line. If 28% of players develop cognitive problems, that’s three starters from each side of the ball on your favorite team. I don’t want to feel like I’m contributing to that by becoming an audience for the advertising. I’ve stopped reading about the games, too, although I’ve clicked on some stories about Michael Sam.
What happens to football in the longer term is still hard to say because we don’t know how many young players and parents will decide this just isn’t worth it. In the meantime the NFL is suffering lots of self-inflicted wounds on top of these issues.
President Theodore Roosevelt (who was not exactly a wimp) once threatened to ban football in the USA, because of the huge number of college-level players who were killed every year playing the game. The rules were changed to allow the forward pass, which significantly reduced the systemic violence of the game by spreading out over more of the field.
Quite honestly, I think the fans of the game would accept switching to Flag Football at the NFL level, rather than to see a plethora of arbitrary judgment-call penalties aimed at protecting the players. In Flag Football, all the fundamental skills of present day football would be retained, with a substantial reduction in the risk of injury to the players.
I’d be more likely to think football would disappear entirely if it weren’t for boxing, MMA, and the WWE.
I could definitely see it becoming more niche like those sports, though. What happens sort of depends on how the NFL reacts. I mean, there was a long period where the game was played without the horrific rate of brain trauma, right? I can see them going back to that (or maybe something along the lines of the CFL?) if failure to do so meant their profits withering away entirely.
Was there? Or was it simply that no one was measuring the damage?
I don’t know, actually. Considering the way the builds of the players and the rules have changed over the years, though, I think a case could be made that there was.
NFL football was rougher in the 1950s than it is now. Helmets were skin-tight and leather, and offered almost no meaningful protection, with no face mask at all. A runner was not whistled down until tacklers had immobilized him, not just the knee touching the ground. When black players first made their appearance, some of the white players literally tried to kill them. Buddy Young came off the field once with cleat marks penetrating through his helmet.
The brain-injury rate was very high a few decades ago, but only recognized with a recent report that showed that the life expectancy of NFL interior linemen was somewhere around 50.
The CFL is not the answer, the CFL play style requires a running quarterback, and half way through the season, four of the 9 QBs are out indefinitely or for the season, and two more were hurt last week and will mis at least this week’s game. Even though CFL rules on roughing the passer are stricter than in the NFL.
I’ll grant some level of ‘rougher’ in the 1950s, but it’s not clear to me that chronic brain injury was worse. With fewer and worse helmets and pads, players couldn’t slam into each other as hard and often, and it’s the repeated impacts that cause long-term chronic brain injury.
The issue isn’t the roughness, per-se, but rather that the head is used as a weapon due to today’s hard helmets and face masks. Linemen on both sides of the ball are taught to charge at the snap and lead with their heads and hands- typically their heads/faces are a big part of trying to stop the other guy’s charge. It’s not an obviously damaging thing if you’re wearing a hard helmet and have a lineman’s facemask, and it works. It’s rather like the way that mountain goats head-butt, except that after the initial head-butt, they grapple with hands, and that they’re typically not hitting with the top of the head.
They didn’t lead head-first in the 1950s- they were tough, but they didn’t literally butt heads/faces like they do today, and rather tended to lead with their hands a lot more.
In addition to that, runners and tacklers tend to use their heads as weapons far more than in the past. If you watch old films, they all “arm-tackle” rather than today’s violent collision and grapple. You couldn’t dosomething like this without a hard helmet and facemask.
I’m not sure that chronic brain injuries are linked specifically to leading with the head or the helmet, or for that matter the hardness of the hits. The players are bigger and stronger and faster than ever, but if you have guys slamming into each other over and over again for years, this is going to be a problem regardless.
CTE research is in its infancy; the research isn’t there yet to really say exactly what does or doesn’t contribute to it, and the degree of the contributions. My point was that the play style has changed in the last 70 years or so, to a more head-impact centric style, and that considering that one of the few things they do know about CTE is that an accumulation of sub-concussive hits is a cause, it stands to reason that changes in the style of play that emphasize head-impacts would also increase the likelihood of CTE.
You left out girls’/women’s volleyball - there’s a very strong club element there as well.
The difference between those sports and football is, where would the club teams play? Because every level of baseball for 13 year olds and up uses a Major League-sized baseball diamond, finding places for club baseball teams to play isn’t a problem, but unless the football clubs want to being their own goal posts, finding somewhere to play football if high schools no longer do it is going to be a problem.
I expect to see more and more high schools drop football (at least in areas where football isn’t “king,” like Texas) - not so much because mothers are keeping their sons off the field, but because of liability concerns and costs. This is especially true in parts of the country where it rains/snows too much to play soccer in the winter, so they play boys’ soccer in the fall, which competes with football for athletes.
A bump for news of a concussion lawsuit… Against a high school.. Noteworthy because this is the level at which damage could really be done to the sport.
Now, changes could still be made at the high school level. Damage to the game in general will probably still take decades, and given boxing, MMA, and pro wrestling, I still don’t see extinction in the cards. But this is still an important aspect/event here.