It might’ve surprised me if you hadn’t said it’d surprise me. 
An article about a former University of North Carolina player, Ryan Hoffman, who probably had his life destroyed (now homeless, suffers memory loss…) because of football concussions:
There was a “Frontline” episode on concussions and the N.F.L. last year. During it there was mention made that “if mothers keep their sons from playing football because of TBI fears then the talent pool up will dry up.” As everyone knows the N.F.L. is big (REALLY big) business but I think the show had a point. Without players there’s no league (although there were intimations that if “Merkans” quit playing [“Merkan”] football then the N.F.L. will simply try to recruit players from overseas). I don’t see the N.F.L. going away any time soon but eventually? Maybe. Just maybe.
I think that if parents stop letting their kids play football, the NFL’s fanbase will dwindle. I think a lot of people watch the sport that they played as kids and less kids playing football will eventually mean less kids watching football when their older.
And that’s more of a problem for the NFL than the dwindling of the talent pool. If the number of college football players drops by 20%, that’ll weaken the product a little bit, but not enough so anyone cares. But if the number of people watching NFL games on TV drops by 10%, they’ll go into panic mode.
Dan Diamond of Forbes wrote that the most interesting thing about Borland’s retirement announcement was how supportive social media generally was, which represented a fairly serious shift in normative thinking from just a short time ago. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk sent a couple of mildly snarky tweets about a player not realizing how good he had it and was promptly clobbered by a host of responders. In the good old days, football-centric message boards would have lit up about how Borland was disrespecting the shield and disdaining the “privilege” of playing professional football. Not so much today.
In 2013 Malcolm Gladwell opined that we were witnessing the “ghetto-ization of football,” and compared it to the armed forces – the risks are declared and kids from the lower economic rungs sign on to try to better themselves. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they become a casualty.
I read about the evolution of football helmets; apparently up through the late 1960s/early 1970s, the big threat was literally skull fractures, with quite a few players being killed or seriously damaged through that sort of hit.
After the new helmet standards were implemented, skull fractures almost vanished, but the risk of concussion was still there.
Essentially, the equipment and play styles have changed drastically in the past 40 years; if you watch old films of the 40s and 50s, it’s more rugby-like than modern football- big hits weren’t really the thing until the 60s and 70s. Even so-called horrible hits like the one that laid out YA Tuttle don’t look all that bad by today’s standards.