I loved playing football in my youth, and have loved watching it for approaching 50 years now, college and NFL. Still do.

But let's face it: the new medical research has shown that football is "unsafe at any speed", it's just a real dumb game for anyone to play, the brain and other health risks are too great, and there's no way to modify the game to significantly reduce them.

Over time, as these facts sink in socially/culturally, football will die out.

I think football is ultimately a dying institution.

I think a lack of interest will kill it long before medical research will.

(12-08-2017 02:31 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:06 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 12:55 PM)msm96wolf Wrote:  I pray the next generation is more of Brimstone than these snowflakes.

Every year we get close rand closer to Chesty Puller's quote coming true

“Our Country won’t go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won’t be any AMERICA because some foreign soldiery will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race!”

The problem Kap is that not many even know men like Puller existed. Since Viet Nam the pragmatism of the military has been intentionally overlooked and their accomplishments significantly if not wholly unreported. Since then only the political generals who tow the party line (since they are appointed by Congress) are in the public eye.

And that's part and parcel why the quote was made. Sadly it's correct....not any know that Chesty Puller was one of the history's greatest leaders of men.......but I bet everybody on this board can tell you who Kim Kardashian is. We venerate the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

(12-08-2017 02:54 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:31 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:06 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 12:55 PM)msm96wolf Wrote:  I pray the next generation is more of Brimstone than these snowflakes.

Every year we get close rand closer to Chesty Puller's quote coming true

“Our Country won’t go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won’t be any AMERICA because some foreign soldiery will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race!”

The problem Kap is that not many even know men like Puller existed. Since Viet Nam the pragmatism of the military has been intentionally overlooked and their accomplishments significantly if not wholly unreported. Since then only the political generals who tow the party line (since they are appointed by Congress) are in the public eye.

And that's part and parcel why the quote was made. Sadly it's correct....not any know that Chesty Puller was one of the history's greatest leaders of men.......but I bet everybody on this board can tell you who Kim Kardashian is. We venerate the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

The competitive physical violence of football has kept America's martial spirit vibrant for longer than any other Western Democracy.

But football is not the only way to do it. We could allow old Big East style basketball. Or allow cross-country meets that are full contact in the first 100 yards (that's how my brother competed). The big problem is that do-gooders are reducing the physical competition in other sports even when it doesn't permanently injure anyone.

(12-08-2017 02:25 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 08:51 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 08:42 AM)Gamecock Wrote:  There might be a significant decline in affluent white kids playing, but I don't think that will affect the sport itself.

But that would greatly impact the advertisers.

Why? Advertisers make much more off of the working poor and lower middle class than they do off of the niche tastes of the affluent.

I'm not seeing advertising for/to the working poor and lower middle class during NFL games. Maybe my market is different.

(12-08-2017 03:38 PM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:25 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 08:51 AM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 08:42 AM)Gamecock Wrote:  There might be a significant decline in affluent white kids playing, but I don't think that will affect the sport itself.

But that would greatly impact the advertisers.

Why? Advertisers make much more off of the working poor and lower middle class than they do off of the niche tastes of the affluent.

I'm not seeing advertising for/to the working poor and lower middle class during NFL games. Maybe my market is different.

Then you are obviously blind to fast food and beer commercials and low end car and car insurance commercials.

(12-08-2017 03:11 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:54 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:31 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 02:06 PM)Kaplony Wrote:  

(12-08-2017 12:55 PM)msm96wolf Wrote:  I pray the next generation is more of Brimstone than these snowflakes.

Every year we get close rand closer to Chesty Puller's quote coming true

“Our Country won’t go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won’t be any AMERICA because some foreign soldiery will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race!”

The problem Kap is that not many even know men like Puller existed. Since Viet Nam the pragmatism of the military has been intentionally overlooked and their accomplishments significantly if not wholly unreported. Since then only the political generals who tow the party line (since they are appointed by Congress) are in the public eye.

And that's part and parcel why the quote was made. Sadly it's correct....not any know that Chesty Puller was one of the history's greatest leaders of men.......but I bet everybody on this board can tell you who Kim Kardashian is. We venerate the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

The competitive physical violence of football has kept America's martial spirit vibrant for longer than any other Western Democracy.

But football is not the only way to do it. We could allow old Big East style basketball. Or allow cross-country meets that are full contact in the first 100 yards (that's how my brother competed). The big problem is that do-gooders are reducing the physical competition in other sports even when it doesn't permanently injure anyone.

Our society is being intentionally made docile. The simple raising of one's voice for emphasis is now viewed as threatening. The fantasy that facebook and twitter connect people in ways that enhance social skills is a canard. People learn appropriate behavior by socializing, not by retreating into an anonymous media to gang like and dislike somebody else's impulsive posts. That too is creating a frightened America that can be counted on to emotionally, rather than confidently and rationally, respond to a crisis.

People who socialize are not as fearful, have a sense of what others believe and why and are not threatened by those beliefs, and learn to think through social issues and respond in manners that invite healthy conversation and debate rather than to label and dismiss countering points of view. But mostly those who socialize feel empowered by being with others. It's the empowerment that corporate America fears. They don't like employees who question flawed policies, or who organize to make a point. And now that they control the media they like being able to manipulate public opinion (left or right) in order to accomplish an agenda.

Fearful, docile, and physically isolated people never change anything, no matter how oppressive it may be.

So yeah, I fear our ability to prosecute our own defense vigorously.

The NFL is in serious jeopardy. They are on the verge of pricing themselves out of the market. Taking a family of 4 to a game cost serious doubts dough. Being a fan is expensive and it's hard to establish brand loyalty if young fans don't have direct exposure to their team and the game.

A few decades ago fans supported every sports team in their town but with their entertainment dollars stretched thin fans in multi sport towns are increasing choosing just one sport to follow. Each league is marketing to different demographics. Wealthier, liberal leaning milennials are abandoning football for soccer in droves. I think the NFL thought that they might be able to capture some of those consumers by allowing the anthem protests to go on only to royally peeve their middle class conservative followers and the drop in viewership and attendence has shown.

I think we are going to see some rule changes that encourage safety but I think the damage is already done. Less kids are playing football. The kids who are come from poorer families and have less purchasing power which means advertisers are are less inclined to provide the advertising dollars to keep the NFL going in its current state.

College football in the Midwest and Southeast is a bit better equipped to handle it because football is deeply engrained in the regional culture but the decline is already set in on the coasts.

(12-08-2017 08:37 AM)miko33 Wrote:  Steelers LB Ryan Shazier sustained a nasty injury on MNF. I was watching the game and after he made the tackle (he speared the guy), we could see that he could not move his legs. He had spinal surgery yesterday. Not too long afterwards, Joe Mixon from the Bengals was lying prone with a concussion and he was also carted off on a stretcher. He ended up being fine with full range of mobility but is now in concussion protocol.

http://triblive.com/sports/steelers/1304...on-surgery

Is FB dying via a long and drawn out process? Or is it going to be around but have a smaller footprint in the future, i.e. the "poor man's" sport? Hard to say, but I think it's popularity will wane in the future.

Participation in HS is flat, but now that CTE might be diagnosed while living is the real game changer.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/16/health/cte...index.html

Actual abstract: https://academic.oup.com/neurosurgery/ar...36/4616608

(12-08-2017 09:34 AM)mpurdy22 Wrote:  Would a rule change on defense that you cannot leave your feet to make a tackle make the sport safer? I think in HS you are not allowed to hurdle a player when carrying the ball?

That does NOTHING for 8/9 of the players on the field who receive the majority of the repeative, blunt force hits on every play: the OL and DL.
https://www.inverse.com/article/37934-nf...ain-injury

(12-08-2017 09:50 AM)jaredf29 Wrote:  Anecdotally, doesn’t it seem like there are more concussions nowadays? My wife and I were talking about this literally last night. I played football for years and never saw anyone or experienced a concussion myself. This was in the 90s it just seems like something’s changed.

Concussions are/were never the problem. Repeated blunt hits to the head are.

Sports are less important in our society now. Attending live sports in particular is in decline. Too expensive. And HD makes watching at home really enjoyable. Sports are all niche.. Just like music... too many choices... too little time to focus.

Male ess is under attack... if you look cross-eyed at a woman.. It is a microaggression.

Football has a cte problem. Social justice problem... is expensive to participate in. The NFL moves franchises from city to city.. Many problems.

BTW fellas the science on CTE is far from settled. Current studies do not have a very large sample size.

I'm too young to have experienced the halcyon days of boxing but I feel like that is a solid analogy for the potential popularity decline football is facing. Participation at the youth levels continues to decline and watching Ryan Shazier paralyzed on national television won't do anything to stem the tide. The sport can continue to exist despite declining participation but if it doesn't change it may look like the sport of boxing with its best days far behind it.

Nobody has mentioned the issue that I think will be most important going-forward. INSURANCE. Beyond participation declining, the ability for youth programs and high schools to pay rising premiums as we learn more about CTE will be massively important to the future of the sport. The ability to test people for CTE while living (these tests seem maybe 10 years out) and liability concerns will kill the sport unless they make serious changes. To quote the article linked below, "Colleges and high schools may face the prospect of no — or very expensive — insurance coverage for football-related concussion risks, which could endanger all but the wealthiest programs, experts say." A sport with lower and lower participation among the youth programs with the financial ability to pay growing insurance premiums combined with the inability of poorer programs to pay these premiums will squeeze the sport into oblivion. My guess is football looks like Rugby in 20 years and continues to exist as a result of it.

http://www.businessinsurance.com/article...exclusions

To the folks with the "our society is full of panzies" hot takes, football has gone through existential crises before and I don't think the rule changes of 1906 made American society "weaker." Football is a game. Nothing more, nothing less and it's not worth the long term cognitive ability of any of its participants. Change isn't a sin and the changes coming (we all know kickoffs, punt returns, etc will be gone sooner than later) may provide opportunities. The forward pass didn't kill the sport and so I don't think changing the sport to recognize the long term detrimental effects will kill it.

Here is another article on the concerns insurers have and the ripple effect this may have. It's never good when you're sport is being compared with asbestos:
http://riskandinsurance.com/athletic-hea...liability/

Guess Esports are own future then. 400 lb coach potatoes will rule until they suddenly choke on ham sandwich

I think changing tastes of young kids is more important than CTE or insurance. Do they want to do video games or sports? What is their attention span?

It has an advantage over baseball or basketball in numbers and in the ease of learning. You don't have to start learning skills at age 5 or have a hoop around (not that is nearly the limitation baseball has). That will serve to stem any decline.

One other factor in decline is the arrogance of the ADs and owners. They tick off their fans and limit affordability to the middle of the middle class, discouraging lifelong fans. Long term both college and pro football have some really poor leadership.

Once upon a time Baseball, Boxing and Horse Racing were the biggest sports in the US.

Horse racing fell out of favor in large part because the public didn't trust the results of any but the biggest races and the rise of a period of public piety took away a lot of gambling interest.

Boxing fell out of favor less because of the health issues and much more because of mistrust of the results and the inability of the casual fan and the lower income fan to watch major events at an affordable price (and until the rise of satellite TV, fans in rural areas could not watch if they wanted to pay).

I see similarity between football and boxing.

The casual fan is priced out in pro markets and many college markets. Viewing most games requires payment of a monthly subscription of some sort.

The definition of what is catch is such a mess that on close calls the announcers and even the patched in officiating experts correctly assess what the ruling will be after review with about the same accuracy as a coin flip. Replay review that was supposed to reverse the outrageous errors has lead to some incredibly ticky frame by frame reviews of close bang-bang calls. What was supposed to be based on incontrovertible evidence is now a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) and faith in the outcome of games is falling.

(12-13-2017 11:48 AM)arkstfan Wrote:  Once upon a time Baseball, Boxing and Horse Racing were the biggest sports in the US.

Horse racing fell out of favor in large part because the public didn't trust the results of any but the biggest races and the rise of a period of public piety took away a lot of gambling interest.

Boxing fell out of favor less because of the health issues and much more because of mistrust of the results and the inability of the casual fan and the lower income fan to watch major events at an affordable price (and until the rise of satellite TV, fans in rural areas could not watch if they wanted to pay).

I see similarity between football and boxing.

Your post prompted two thoughts:

(1) While horse racing, boxing, and baseball are not as culturally "big" as they were decades ago in relative terms, in absolute terms all of them, even boxing, are still big business. Baseball is a $10B a year industry, horse racing keeps creating races with $5 million purses, and Floyd Mayweather gets paid $100 million per fight. So somebody is paying to see these sports.

(2) I agree that football and boxing are similar, in that they are both "unsafe at any speed". There's simply no way to modify the sports to make them brain-safe, unlike say soccer, where if they got rid of using your head to hit the ball, that would probably do the trick.

One difference: Since day one, everyone has known that boxing is a very health-risky sport. For that reason, it's never been a mass participation sport. Probably only 1 out of 1000 people who watch boxing matches have ever actually boxed. Boxers have always been a rare breed willing to basically die young with dementia.

Football is different: It built itself as a mass-participation sport, and knowledge of these brain risks is something new. I'm not sure the NFL can survive as a sport played by only a small niche of people like boxing always has.

(12-13-2017 11:54 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(12-13-2017 11:48 AM)arkstfan Wrote:  Once upon a time Baseball, Boxing and Horse Racing were the biggest sports in the US.

Horse racing fell out of favor in large part because the public didn't trust the results of any but the biggest races and the rise of a period of public piety took away a lot of gambling interest.

Boxing fell out of favor less because of the health issues and much more because of mistrust of the results and the inability of the casual fan and the lower income fan to watch major events at an affordable price (and until the rise of satellite TV, fans in rural areas could not watch if they wanted to pay).

I see similarity between football and boxing.

Your post prompted two thoughts:

(1) While horse racing, boxing, and baseball are not as culturally "big" as they were decades ago in relative terms, in absolute terms all of them, even boxing, are still big business. Baseball is a $10B a year industry, horse racing keeps creating races with $5 million purses, and Floyd Mayweather gets paid $100 million per fight. So somebody is paying to see these sports.

(2) I agree that football and boxing are similar, in that they are both "unsafe at any speed". There's simply no way to modify the sports to make them brain-safe, unlike say soccer, where if they got rid of using your head to hit the ball, that would probably do the trick.

One difference: Since day one, everyone has known that boxing is a very health-risky sport. For that reason, it's never been a mass participation sport. Probably only 1 out of 1000 people who watch boxing matches have ever actually boxed. Boxers have always been a rare breed willing to basically die young with dementia.

Football is different: It built itself as a mass-participation sport, and knowledge of these brain risks is something new. I'm not sure the NFL can survive as a sport played by only a small niche of people like boxing always has.

Boxing was mass participation until the 1940's. Most colleges and high schools had teams and there were numerous clubs in most cities.

(12-13-2017 03:19 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(12-13-2017 11:54 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(12-13-2017 11:48 AM)arkstfan Wrote:  Once upon a time Baseball, Boxing and Horse Racing were the biggest sports in the US.

Horse racing fell out of favor in large part because the public didn't trust the results of any but the biggest races and the rise of a period of public piety took away a lot of gambling interest.

Boxing fell out of favor less because of the health issues and much more because of mistrust of the results and the inability of the casual fan and the lower income fan to watch major events at an affordable price (and until the rise of satellite TV, fans in rural areas could not watch if they wanted to pay).

I see similarity between football and boxing.

Your post prompted two thoughts:

(1) While horse racing, boxing, and baseball are not as culturally "big" as they were decades ago in relative terms, in absolute terms all of them, even boxing, are still big business. Baseball is a $10B a year industry, horse racing keeps creating races with $5 million purses, and Floyd Mayweather gets paid $100 million per fight. So somebody is paying to see these sports.

(2) I agree that football and boxing are similar, in that they are both "unsafe at any speed". There's simply no way to modify the sports to make them brain-safe, unlike say soccer, where if they got rid of using your head to hit the ball, that would probably do the trick.

One difference: Since day one, everyone has known that boxing is a very health-risky sport. For that reason, it's never been a mass participation sport. Probably only 1 out of 1000 people who watch boxing matches have ever actually boxed. Boxers have always been a rare breed willing to basically die young with dementia.

Football is different: It built itself as a mass-participation sport, and knowledge of these brain risks is something new. I'm not sure the NFL can survive as a sport played by only a small niche of people like boxing always has.

Boxing was mass participation until the 1940's. Most colleges and high schools had teams and there were numerous clubs in most cities.

Actually, I think boxing is less popular because of quite a few 'fixes' happened and the public distrust of boxing being a true and fair fight.

Horseracing (in general) has had some issues also. But the races still have a pretty decent following.

Boxing lost out because the top heavyweights are the ones now playing football instead of boxing. Then again if violence is the issue, how come UFC is booming?

NCAA boxing was a pretty big deal back in the day, Wisconsin would get crowds of 10 to 15k in the old field house.

It all came to an end in 1960 when Madison hosted the NCAA championships which saw Badger star Charlie Mohr end up in a coma and die a few days later. Within a month UW had disbanded their 9 time NCAA champion boxing program and within the next year the NCAA stopped sponsoring the sport.