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The Fragile Legs of the National Football League
Ask a sports reporter about the future of the NFL (such as the way Peter Robinson asked Andrew Beaton of The Wall Street Journal on this week’s Ricochet Podcast) and one usually gets a recitation of the latest Nielsen ratings. Yes, football dominates today’s airwaves. But that is like complimenting a paint job on an old home where the timbers in the basement are a rotting mess of leaking water and a banquet for termites. The old place has charm – but for how long?
If you don’t like the building metaphor and wish to stick with sports, the National Football League is a thoroughbred racehorse, beautiful, sleek, and very powerful and yet dependent on very fragile legs that are sometimes asked to bear up to ten times the pressure of the horse’s weight. A slight bump, an entanglement with another animal, a sharper than anticipated turn and it collapses into a fall that is over 80% fatal.
As Peter noted in the podcast, more and more parents are saying “no” to the sport. Participation in youth leagues has been steadily declining, losing almost 40% of its participants since 2008. This has led to a decline in the high school game as well, but with the reductive nature of sports (most kids bail on organized sports by the time they turn 15) it’s off a more modest 3%.
But those numbers could worsen and quickly. So far, the courts have been reluctant to side with parents over injuries. But that has been limited to immediate, traumatic injuries. Most school boards demand a waiver to play football and parents and participants have to acknowledge the risks when players don the pads and helmet. And then comes CTE.
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a long-term degenerative brain disease. It can lead to debilitating headaches, cognitive problems, and depression. No one knows how widespread it is because it cannot be diagnosed with certainty in the living and can only be confirmed by autopsy. But young men who have played the game and taken their own lives as young as ages 18 and 21 have shown to be suffering from it.
In 2018 the family of former University of Texas defensive lineman Greg Ploetz decided to test the limits of past participation in the sport by suing the NCAA for negligence. (Ploetz, who was a member of the 1969 Longhorns squad that won the National Championship, passed away in a long term care facility in 2015.) After three days of testimony, the NCAA pursued a settlement and set up a $70M fund to address further claims. There is another class-action suit working its way through the courts now.
Should that trickle down to the high school level – and should insurance companies decide that the game can no longer be underwritten, the fragile legs that support the game at the pro and college level will collapse. There will be rehabilitation attempts, but the window for recovery will be as small as any thoroughbred’s.
In the year that the Ploetzes settled their suit with the NCAA only 839,000 kids, ages 6-12, were playing youth tackle football. Compare that to baseball and basketball which were both north of the 4 million mark. And unlike those sports, there is no backup talent pool playing elsewhere. Major League Baseball can continue to recruit from the poor streets of places like San Pedro de Macorís (D.R.) and Caracas, Venezuela. The NBA can always rely on coaches from smaller colleges hanging out in the inner cities to scout for talented ballers. There is nowhere else where the NFL can turn.
Published in Sports
I gotta push back a little on this. Ali vs. Frazier fights were probably the biggest sporting events of 70’s. Boxing has numerous problems stemming from limiting their product going pay-per-view on their biggest fights, being disorganized with too many organizations and going from dynamic fighters like Ali, Frazier and Foreman to boring fighters like Larry Holmes and the Spinks brothers.
If I was a straight marginal player in one the sports leagues I’d come out as gay. Think of the endorsement opportunities and the additional job security. I don’t think a GM wants to be called a homophobe for cutting me.
That’s reasonable, Thelonious. I didn’t say it turned on a dime. There’d continue to be great bouts in the 70s, and a generation of men who grew up with boxing and stayed with it. Ali vs. Frazier were Black vs Black fighters, but there was still a political/media/publicity angle of race with any Ali fight. Frazer was supposedly “the Man’s” choice, which was unfair to someone who grew up in poorer circumstances and saw more prejudice growing up than Ali. A lot of writing about boxing was dominated by intellectuals like Norman Mailer, the kind of writers who did 1000 word pieces for The New York Times Sunday Magazine about the so-called Sweet Science.
In 1960, you could ask any schoolboy who the Heavyweight champ was and he’d tell you in a second. By the ’90s, that was no longer true, as in, at all. The fan base for boxing still existed, but it had aged. The kids cared about MMA and WWE.
When did it change? We both agree: sometime after the Rumble in the Jungle era, sometime after Gerry Cooney (“Schlocky”), probably sometime around the time Tyson started biting people’s ears.
Yep, the leftists won this battle.
What was once the biggest weekend of the year ’round Here, TEXAS / ou weekend, passed by in the blink of an eye. I didn’t even know it was that time of year until I was out in public and saw the game on tv.
Quit watching Cowboys since Jerry knelt. Rangers and Stars knelt; off. Haven’t watched the NBA thugs in years.
Can’t even watch golf anymore. They spotlight some no name making a statement wearing one white shoe and one black shoe. “Yeah, Spartacus, that’ll work.”
I did enjoy watching rowing on The Olympic Channel yesterday. So, there’s that.
1958 Greatest Game was a seminal event
Colts vs Giants
I like your metaphors, both for their rhetorical beauty and their apt description. I don’t know about other people, but I don’t watch football anymore, and I used to watch religiously. The brain damage, the crudeness of play, the overt advantage they’ve given to offense so that there is scoring on at least every other possession, and of course the anti-American posturing all have made it very distasteful for me.
I never thought I’d see conservatives rooting for the demise of professional football, but that’s what politics in the sport has done.
It’s a shame. As I wrote the other day, American football puts chess to shame. It’s the height of war gaming with generals, field commanders, and soldiers attempting to both outwit and out-execute opponents play after play with the whole field formation being essential for every maneuver. It’s the most sophisticated sport in human history.
My brother played football before he was a teenager. His son plays flag football.
Next up, tennis lawsuits for bad knees.
I think the problem is the “pro” part.
I have been thinking about why Indy Car racing peaked in 1972, and just like the rest of america 1973 was a bad year.
There is this wild age of innovation, of great heroes, and great variance in talent, skill, etc. And the game actually matters. As time progresses, it becomes an industry, where the gap between top or bottom, and chance, and wild plays or runs, or new innovations just sort of goes away. Over time it becomes a mature industry. The game/race, whatever becomes boring. The dimension of competition stops being about the game, it starts getting into rules, or 2nd or 3rd tier concerns.
For Indy the peak was 1972, and due to ecology, safety, etc the race plateaued. NASCAR is in the same boat as F1 which is basically a vehicle for human drama.
Football is a mature industry too.
Video games have the same problem too. The excitement comes in from the unexpected and being able to recover. But E-sports has crystallized the form(s) into its perfect incarnation and hasn’t really evolved meaningfully in 20 years or so.
When was the last time sports were really and truly exciting and what was the source of that excitment? Why are we still talking about the greats of decades past and the great gladiators of today are kind of meh.
Remember when the PC was wild and exciting and each new thing released was crazy and drove it forward? Remember when you actually really cared about the new smartphone release.
There is this differentiation between disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation. With sustaining innovation you are giving your customers more of the same except better faster stronger. With disruptive change you are giving your customers something new. When an industry is young there is a lot of different ideas competing and over time the best ideas win out. Over time. What happens over the long term? In the long term, you eliminate all the different and unique ideas from a wild age of innovation and you have perfected the form so the dimensions of competition is pretty narrow. So its stops being interesting.
Sport as an industry makes sport boring in the long term. Because its a hyper perfected product.
My high schools swim team had a larger injury list than the football team.
Elbows.
I think the love for the heavyweight division faded when the last rounds of their bouts turned into clinchfests. Big guys (with some exceptions) seem to tire more easily. Give me a middleweight bout any day . . .
The end of the NFL. Ask @blondie how she lost her love for hockey . . .
Good idea. Kids’ bodies are still developing, so give ’em a chance before they start to play tackle . . .
Tyson was the last heavyweight fighter to really capture the public’s imagination, because of his meteoric rise and his seeming ability to take out all challengers in just 1-2 rounds. His stunning loss to Buster Douglas, and then the legal troubles he got into was really the death-knell for the sport as a top-tier media one, and the Tyson-Douglas bout is now almost 31 years old.
I can’t like your metaphor for obvious reasons. Boxing started going down hill when pro football started rising. (except when we had bigger than life champions such as Ali, Frazier, Foreman)
Horse racing declined as the population moved to more urban and less rural areas. Fewer people had a personal connection with animals. Now it’s the betting and a few Middle Eastern Sheiks that keep it afloat.
I think PPV is the biggest factor. I used to watch boxing on ESPN Friday nights. I loved listening to Sam Rosen and Al Berstein, and it was free (well, except for the cable bill). But to pay big $$$ for a major fight which could be over in the first 15 seconds? No way . . .
I’m not rooting for the demise of the NFL. I’m rooting for the demise of politics in all sports . . .
While there was a thread a couple of weeks ago on Ricochet celebrating the life of Bob Gibson, from a fan’s standpoint, the dominance of Gibson, Kolfax, Denny McLain and other pitchers in the mid-to-late 1960s was a huge disaster for the sport, because the plethora of 1-0 and 2-1 games came at the exact same time as the NFL and AFL were in their bidding war for players and then their merger, and as the Sunday afternoon NFL football games became a staple on NBC and CBS.
The AFL especially was a pass-oriented, offensive-minded league, but overall the difference in levels of action between the 1968 MLB season and the ’68 NFL season, which capped Vince Lombardi’s run in Green Bay, just made football the more TV-friendly sport, at a time when the move by the public from B&W to color television was also out in full force.
The other thing about that compared to the past decade is the fans preference shift from baseball to football was a completely organic one, whereas the effort since about 2013 or so to push the idea that the NBA was going to do to the NFL what pro football did to baseball 45 years earlier was far more of a top-down media effort, with execs like former ESPN boss John Skipper trying to force the change onto the public with the network’s non-stop promotion of pro basketball in the 2014-to-present period (though the attempt to denigrate the NFL and MLB to pump up the NBA mostly ended when Jimmy Pitaro took over for Skipper).
I’m watching replays of the Green Bay Packers 1996 Super Bowl run. Every game is available in full on Youtube.
The game is also so much better. Real hitting, defense, no treating the QB like fragile china.
I stopped watching the NBA when they changed the rules and eliminated defense. Watching the teams run back and forth tossing up three pointers as quickly as possible is boring.
The problem is not so much the weight of the linemen as the blazing speed of players compared to the past.
The energy involved in a collision is determined more by velocity then mass…
KE = 1/2 M V(2)
Wasn’t it always the betting that kept it afloat?
Gambling may keep the NFL afloat too.
My nose was broken (again) in a game of flag football. Two of us ran to catch the football and I got a shoulder to the face while he was focused on the ball. Where there is running or any strenuous activity, there is risk of injury.
I agree that football needs player weight limits and a return to lighter padding. A bigger guy can take a bigger hit, but that regards only muscular padding and bone density. Fascia and joints have limits. Bigger players mean greater force applied to brains regardless of skull protection.
Adults should have more freedom than kids to risk their own bodies in even foolish pursuits.
Best Comment of the Day.
The main thing that will keep the NFL — and even the NBA and its miserable ratings — afloat directly is going to be the fact that live sports is one of the only places where viewers can’t fast-foward through the ads. It makes the ad spaces there far more valuable than in shows where time-shifting is more common.
That’s why ESPN/Disney threw their ‘Nuke the NFL’ strategy in the final years under John Skipper in the dumpster, and now are preparing to up their bid for a new contract, in order to join CBS, NBC and Fox in the Super Bowl rotation (Skipper was actually prepared to dump the ESPN Monday Night Football contract, because he thought the cost wasn’t worth the benefit — Disney now is prepared to put MNF back on ABC in order to get the Super Bowl every four years).
From the NBA’s standpoint, the live sports/ad rate connection means even with their current 2 a.m. infomercial-level ratings, they’re still likely to get decent TV contracts in 2024, albeit it probably not at the same level as in 2014, when Disney and Time-Warner gave the league a contract that was almost the equal of the NFL deal, based completely on the idea that the payments would be a bargain a decade down the line, because pro basketball was destined to become the No. 1 rated sport on TV by the early 2020s, and the NFL would be on it’s downward slide.
Absolutely. We know this when the focus around the sport has no connection to the sport.
I don’t think they’re rooting against the game. They’re rooting against the league and what it has become.
I stopped watching when they made tattoos mandatory and thuggery acceptable . . .