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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 would say for kids, yes. However, once in high school, the limits have to be removed.
I like the idea of “team can put a maximum combined weight on the field at any one time” limit, although it’s hard to enforce track on any one play.
My dad played Big-10 “sprint” football back in the late ’40s – Players had to weigh less than 150 pounds. I think they might still play it in the Ivys.
THis is spot on. I’d add that the corporatization of things is part of it too.
This isn’t the football we loved. Remember the good ole days when players weren’t whiners and referees like Jerry Siemens and Jerry Markbreit were fun to watch?
You could still end up with one three-hundred pounder destroying a smaller player.
That kind of thing could get very weird as people try gimmicks. One giant with ten Chinese acrobats. Nothing but Refrigerator runs and trick plays.
This is best solved by reducing padding, as suggested above. Make it impossible to safely launch at each other and the players will quickly slim down, as speed, agility, and grasping rather than direct violent collision become the only viable options.
At the same time, playing off @garymcvey ‘s point, we saw Americans cheering for our black athletes to beat Nazi German supermen in the 1930s, and today boxing and MMA aree very strong Latin American and European sports, so you get America versus Mexico, Ireland, England, Russia, Ukraine . . . . Of course, Americans who claim Irish roots were happy to cheer for bad boy Connor McGregor.
I am slightly less pessimistic overall than EJ is. The fuss about head injuries is legitimate, but only to the extent that percussive impacts are differentially present above a critical threshold. The crisis is fomented by the ambulance chasers, not the inherent characteristics of the sport. Get rid of the ridiculous incentives- punitive damages and unlimited attorney fees- as was done to prevent the trial lawyers from eliminating all US vaccines, and the problem regulates itself. CTE has been addressed to a meaningful extent (the PR is usually more severe than the facts on the ground as is the case with the showcase BLM incidents) and can be addressed further if need be. A good start would be to prohibit tackling before age 15, tackling in practice at full speed before high school. The NFL will lose some of its most faddish following, as did baseball, boxing, tennis, the Olympics, the NBA, etc. when their hot fad periods passed.
The product on the field can be adjusted to reduce any uniquely dangerous characteristics of football. Remember the long term evolution of the game- it has updated itself continuously for 140 years and continues to do so, from the scrum head-knocking of Lawrenceville versus Andover in The Varmint through the Teddy Roosevelt crisis (if you think that Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is/was a big deal, try 19 fatalities in one season). The modern era of massive behemoths on the offensive and defensive lines colliding at high speed was essentially created by Joe Gibbs around 1980 when he put the full line of Redskins “Hogs” in front of a Riggins battering ram, institutionalising what had been exceptions before; you had the occasional Big Daddy Lipscomb or Art Shell playing at 285 in a world of 250 lb linemen, but Gibbs established the world of very big dudes as baseline. Now the monster sized linemen have predictably increased in athleticism to match, making the collisions more than ever like freight trains meeting head-on. (continued in next comment)
But these freight trains are neither inevitable nor eternal. It is quite easy to design rules changes that mitigate the risk and incentivize the athletic track meet over the explosive collision. As an example, look North, where the Canadians have done this for years. For example, allow additional offensive motion before the snap, set the linemen another yard off the line of scrimmage, stretch out the required minimum distance between offensive tackles- any one of these changes increaes the premium on speed and flexibility, requiring an added instant of hesitation for reading the play and reducing the benefit of simply hitting hard, the classic close quarters scrum. The NFL has evolved into a passing-oriented show over the past two decades and its popularity rose; people really prefer to see skills rather than simply (new metaphor warning) the brutal collisions of elephants. Remember, until 1977, a staple pass rush move was the head slap, and that era was characterized by “getting one’s bell rung” and then returning to the game. When understanding of the changes filters down, participation will level off.
We all recognize that “journalism” today is the most self-referential trade (we won’t feed its arrogant pretensions by calling it a profession). It is populated by mediocrities who feel important when they can opine about Matters Of Great Social Significance. Sportswriters are all too often (see ESPN) “opinion wannabees” who are on crusades to Bring Social Justice To Sports. To the extent they succeed they will drive away sports fans.
The popularity of the NFL will be subject to the general political climate and be driven largely by whether the NFL chooses to follow the NBA into suicide. Here, not in the hospitals, is where football will live or die. Myself, I turn off any sports event when the players or announcers start in on politics and politically correct nonsense such as errant BLM truisms. If the NFL elects to alienate its fan base, they will get the genuine long term declines and deserve what they get.
NFL collective bargaining agreement expires in March 2021.
This should make for some interesting negotiations between the players union and owners
Golf and guns are safer than football
Put those together, golfing with the other players actively defending the cup. Now, that’s a sport.
Our society is becoming too risk adverse to like football….too many basement dwellers who live in fear.