No, my point is it wont be gone, Just transformed and moved out of the public schools into a private or club system.
So the question is if one should consider all sports moving in this direction: why should football be different? Back when I was in high school football was a major part in generating school spirit–unlike say golf, wrestling, bowling. It would seem these other sports would move first.
Pop Warner is a little different from High School sponsored teams though. The kids tend to be younger (sometimes much younger) and being a star there doesn’t carry the privileges and advantages HS does. It’s always been more an additional season/development camp to help feed the schools and build the real superstars that are going to have a shot at a NFL career.
My daughter played at the highest level of competitive soccer. Several of her teammates got D1 scholarships. Her HS team, which would lose to her club team 15-0, got 4X as many spectators as her club games did. Take football away from the high school and the only people who would show up would be parents.
In America, quite likely. In Texas, never.
I can see it becoming a regional sport a la hockey or lacrosse. But not gone.
Well your right in that I can never see a club team having the number of spectators as a school team.
However there are some schools where the football team is actually run by a private group like a booster club and only takes the school name. I’ve seen it in some smaller schools that dont have enough players for their own team so they combine with another.
It may make sense on many levels to disassociate football from schools, but football exists on the level that it does because it is associated with schools. Representing a particular community is why it gets so much attention, and club sports don’t do that nearly as well. (Even NFL teams struggle to sell out really big stadiums but college football does not.) Assuming that a massive cultural shift will happen is a tenuous thing–sometimes it does (see: acceptance of homosexuality), sometimes it doesn’t.
IMNSHO, they need to drop football completely and spend more time educating the kids.
Months ago, a commentator on NPR opined that football would be dead in 10 years. The schools/clubs won’t be able to afford the insurance once the damage caused by repeated impact is reported and litigated.
I think it depends on which part of the country you are talking about.
In Texas, high school football is king, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
In, say, California, it will probably be limited to private schools (e.g. De La Salle in Concord) and club teams. Most public schools in California have had trouble getting even 30 players on a team for decades; clubs allow players from multiple schools to play together, allowing for larger teams. The only problem I can see is, if all of the football fields in the area are on public school grounds, will anybody complain that there aren’t enough girls on club football teams? (IIRC, up through the mid-1970s, Little League had an explicit “No Girls Allowed” sign on its door, until somebody sued on the grounds that most leagues use public fields and so could not discriminate.)
Congress or the states could well pass legislation so that players would sign waivers and thus could not sue.
It won’t go away. The rules will be altered to try (and probably fail) to address the concussion stuff, and in a few places it may go away, but overall it’s going nowhere. Might as well try and reinstate prohibition before getting rid of something like HS football, that’s how futile the notion is.
Or they charge the players(’ parents) a fee to make up for the insurance costs.
Football is increasing dominated by players from the lower class; they or their parents don’t have the money to pay fees (which considering the cost and frequency of concussion related injuries are going to be enormous).
Plus the big football machine needs a constant supply of new parts and is willing to bear almost the entire burden of raw material costs. At least until it comes time to actually compete for the talent pool.
You dont know poor people do you?
They will find the money. Our youth league is about $200. About the same as other sports.
You did a thread about this less than a month ago in The Game Room. What was wrong with the answers you got there?
American football is a completely different game since the rule changes, under political pressure (Teddy Roosevelt, 1905), designed to make it less dangerous. There is no reason it can’t happen again.
That’s my suspicion as to what’ll happen as well, except that I think what’ll happen is that the increased publicity of the NFL suits and players will terrify parents, and the rule changes will actually happen at the high school level first, and work their way upward.
Here’s a local case:
Do some math: it doesn’t take that many cases at $1 million each to vastly increase this $200 figure.