That’s the opinion of a blogger at the Atlantic, reacting to news that UCLA researchers have made a significant step towards diagnosing CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) in living brains.
Once it can be reliably pointed out, he doesn’t think that junior football (Pop Warner, high school, maybe even college) can survive, and that thus the death of the pro league can’t be far behind.
Thoughts?
A move to address the known dangers will be made with advances in equipment design and materials. More ‘cushion’ can be built into helmets, shoulder pads, etc much like giving boxers larger gloves. Some resistance will arise because the look this additional padding will produce won’t be near as ‘sexy’. In fact some of the early attempts like the two part shell helmet looked downright goofy. But people will get used to it. Once the NFL falls in line, so it will go all the way down to PeeWee leagues.
That’s not to say that some parents won’t opt out regardless, but I don’t think there’s any way organized football as we know it is going away.
I’ve heard hours of talk radio on the matter 
and my opinion is that there will be changes on all levels, but like boxing and MMA , football will still exist. It will continue to prosper because there is a market and demand. Sure the NBA might take more of the US’s top atheletes and we all would love to see people like Adrian Peterson playing soccer.
Deaths in football were a common thing, once upon a time. They changed the sport. It still continued to grow in popularity.
People like football. You can change it quite considerably to reduce head injuries and people will continue to like football. I can’t offhand think of a single example - not one - where changing the rules of a popular sport in a logical fashion has damaged its popularity. Baseball made people wear helmets. Basketball has changed its rules many times. Hockey has changed rules dramatically. In no case did a rule change turn fans off the sport.
The blogger’s belief has less to do with rules changes and more to do with “what parent is going to let their kid play a sport that has a 5% chance of giving him crippling brain damage”?
Disclosure - HUGE football fan
Yes we will continue to learn just how bad football is to the human brain.
Yes it will 100% be proven to be brutal and barbaric.
And yes I firmly believe that at some point in the VERY distant future, football will disappear and people will look back on the sport with disbelief in much the same way we look at the Roman Gladiators.
That said, football will exist long after everyone on this board is dead and buried. Why do I say this?
Draw the parallels to tobacco smoking. We know its unhealthy beyond any reasonable doubt. We know it kills tens of thousands every year and ever hurts those around it.
But we also know that enough people still want it (unbelievably), even after it has been taxed, banned from advertising and prohibited in many areas all to Hades. However corporations and politicians still make millions per year (billions?) so it is going no where.
Football is much the same, people want it, the money is huge and we still allow it and advertise it. And people are not dying by the tens of thousands annually to have it exist. And before you break out the addiction angle, I will posit that many football fans would react with classic withdraw symptoms if the game were outlawed. 
Besides, doesn’t MMA and Boxing have to disappear first? :dubious:
Kids without much other opportunities. Military service also has a chance of resulting in death or serious injury, yet people continue to do it, I picture much the same with professional football.
If high schools and colleges dump football as a program, the gap will be filled by something akin to the minor leagues. Football is just too big, too much of a money maker, to go away. Like AAU, they’ll be travelling football teams, then maybe feeder systems and minor league ball like baseball. Football will adapt, and kids will still want to play in the NFL.
One thing that may happen is that schools may not want to take on the liability. If several students a year test positive for this and the school is sued for medical costs, schools may be forced to drop the sport.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s a shame that the marquee sport for high school is a high-impact, injury-prone sport. Hopefully a non-contact sport like basketball will take over.
I think football will be around for quite some time but it may morph into something we don’t recognize today.
What exactly triggered the beginning of the end for boxing?
They tried replacing football with rugby at one point (seriously, the California-Stanford “Big Game” switched from football to rugby for about three years early in the 20th Century, mainly because it was less brutal, if not outright deadly, than football). It didn’t work. Besides, football is just a modification of “Rugby League”, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if, eventually, players have to wear some form of padding over their entire bodies (sort of a “suit of armor”), and helmets need to become much safer. There will always be injuries - one tackle from a particular direction while a player’s foot is in the wrong spot, or two players making hits from different directions at once on the same player, and someone’s football career, if not their ability to walk without a limp, is over - but this hasn’t stopped the game yet, and I don’t see it stopping it any time soon.
What is far more likely to “end” football, at least at the high school and younger level, are (a) the costs of this new safer equipment meaning that fewer and fewer schools can afford it, especially as you have to spend an identical amount on girls’ sports (please let’s not turn this into a debate over Title IX), and (b) “Sarcastiball” - i.e. making too many rules changes (e.g. “no kickoffs”) just for the sake of making the game “safer.”
I said football will still be around, like boxing and MMA.
I am not 100% sure why boxing popularity has shrunk but it is my understanding that boxing, in its hayday was a very popular regional event. In other words, it was a local thing. At that point it was almost as big as baseball. As TV increased nationally televised sports, it has diminished over the years. Boxing is nowhere near as popular as it was.
MMA is growing by leaps and bounds and has a great product but it isn’t nearly as popular as football.
Boxing has declined due to a number of factors like the proliferation of boxing associations who each have their own champion, pay-per-view’s and (to a lesser extent) pay-cable’s near-monopoly over the televising of important matches and the sport’s disappearance from free TV, the lack of marquee names known by people who aren’t hardcore boxing fans, the lingering bad taste in the mouth left by Mike Tyson chomping off Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997, the image of great fighters like Muhammad Ali (who was arguably the most famous athlete in the world during the 60s and 70s) crippled by brain damage caused by boxing, its aging fan base, and the ongoing stench of corruption which the sport can’t shake no matter how much it tries.
As for pro football, I think it’s too big and too smart to die. They’ll just makes changes in the rules, uniforms, helmets, and safety equipment and keep going. The only thing that could kill this sport is if it’s proven that brain damage will always occur no matter what safety measures are taken.
Or “20% chance of giving him mild brain damage”
While there have always been parents who discouraged football, our society is one embracing very high levels of safety. Choices that were normal 30+ years ago are now unthinkable.
I think that lower levels of football (kids 14 and under, for example) are going to have to go low contact.
Higher levels of football aren’t going to be able to technology themselves out of this problem, either. It seems to be the case that sub-concussive hits cause this damage too, a better helmet isn’t going to make it all go away. The action of the game will have to change.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to contradict you or correct you or whatever – I was just asking a side question. It’s not clear to me if boxing’s biggest setback was related to the injury rate or if it’s all the other stuff (corruption, infighting, etc.) and the injuries are just the icing on the cake.
Things change. While tv ratings remain high, NFL attendance has slowly declined annually since 2007 (not including 2012, which I don’t think have been completely compiled yet; through 8 weeks it was running about even with 2011). And the average attendance for college football’s top division declined this season for the first time since 2003.
That’s not an argument in and of itself for a lessening of popularity but it might be the first few cracks in the ice. The next sign of trouble could be something like communities banning football for those under the age of 10 or 11. Followed by cash-strapped high school districts with declining enrollments giving it up.
Or maybe lawsuits, both against the NFL and the NCAA, begin taking their tolls. College players are seeking compensation for use of their likenesses from the schools, and have made a little bit of legal headway. The question of the NFL’s liability in the injury suits is certainly not a slam dunk for the league.
Because of its enormous popularity, football won’t be leaving us soon. But what is to say that the generations following will find it as entertaining as we do?
I think there is a shelf life of football. something around 20 years.
This story appeared in the Bergen County NJ Record newspaper on Monday.
I know Bruce Harper. I love Bruce Harper. He is one of the finest people I have ever met. I feel so very badly for him. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject.
Boxing in the abstract is still popular. The lower weight classes still sell PPV with big names like before. The sport, however, is not what it was, not because of injury or death (hell, Ray Mancini unintentionally killed Duk Koo Kim on national TV in 1982) but because there are too many boxing organizations, too many fighters getting stripped of titles they earned because they fought the WBA’s top contender instead of the IBF’s or WBC’s top guys. Additionally, there are no big-time heavyweights, they’re all nobodys, not an Ali, Frazier or Foreman in the bunch.
Last, there are too many farces. People pay out the wazoo to see first-round no-decisions or other nonsense and they got tired of getting burned, so they turned to MMA which is no better than boxing at putting on good fights but people know the fights are generally short and have learned to live with it.
Boxing is still healthy in the lower divisions.
Anyway, this relates to football in that the game has concerns, but someone will always want to play and someone will always want to watch so it’ll always exist at some level. What we need to do is get past this risk-averse thing we’ve been going through. We can’t mitigate everything, and if people make informed decisions it’s not our problem. Football players, contrary to popular opinion, know (and knew) about all of this a long time ago. Nobody gets a broken bone or knocked out or feels like they were in a trainwreck and thinks it’s a normal thing.