
What Would the End of Football Look Like? (2012) - mhb
http://grantland.com/features/cte-concussion-crisis-economic-look-end-football/
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VLM
Perhaps the collapse has already begun.

1) My middle school kid is in cross country... all "school athletes" must
attend district wide concussion class (they probably blew it off, after all it
is CC not tackle football) and parents have to sign off that they've been
given access to various concussion resources. Nobody found this overly unusual
or interesting, its just part of athletics now. Soon it'll just be part of
school athletics that football means touch not tackle or it means what we used
to call soccer.

(For foreign readers cross country is hiking in the woods except you don't
wear a pack and you run. So mile times are quite a bit lower than track and
you're about a thousand times more likely to get heat exhaustion or twist your
ankle than to get a concussion in that particular sport)

2) Look at average age of baseball fans, late 50s and that average has been
going up more than one year per calendar year. There are generational trends
and football may very well be a WW2/Boomer generation sport. Once "their"
generations are gone, that's it.

Looking at demographics of the local pro basketball team I think we're more
likely to see pro basketball go away before football ... volleyball is very
popular and telegenic.

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elchief
What would the end of grantland look like?

It would look like today, sadly.

[http://espnmediazone.com/us/espn-statement-regarding-
grantla...](http://espnmediazone.com/us/espn-statement-regarding-grantland/)

I'm not really sure why Simmons needed espn to start grantland. Perhaps he was
under contract. I would have read it, due to his writing, either way.

When he didn't show up to cover the Super Bowl or NBA Championships, I knew it
was over.

~~~
PopeOfNope
_It would look like today, sadly._

 _To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth
or oxy)_

Yeah, shame.

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untog
_To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth
or oxy), high-octane basketball is the natural substitute._

Meth or oxy? Interesting article, but I feel like it's, uh, brushing rural
America in some very broad strokes.

That said, I found it interesting that it was discussing the collapse of
sports TV in 2012. Just three years later I think we're inching closer and
closer to that - the average cable subscription subsides ESPN when the
majority of viewers don't watch it. With cable subscriptions declining, there
is huge trouble ahead for ESPN, since they are tied into incredibly expensive
multi-year contracts that they might find themselves unable to afford.

In _totally_ unrelated news, ESPN shut down Grantland yesterday.

~~~
ghaff
Of course, the rest of the world has a football-like sport (rugby--sorry,
Australia) which suggests that there's a fair bit of demand for that general
type of sport--and not just in the US. Rugby has its own issues with
concussions although probably not as much as American football.

In general, I agree with the article that football isn't "too big to fail."
I'm not sure lawsuits is so much the path though as kids simply not playing.
That doesn't seem to be happening however.

~~~
Synaesthesia
What's interesting is that in Rugby you wear basically no protective gear,
which is probably _why_ it has less injuries. With a helmet and armour you
feel much more invulnerable.

~~~
untog
Also tackles above the waist are forbidden. In American Football you can
pretty much just throw your entire body anywhere, with unsurprising results.

~~~
srtjstjsj
this video disagrees with your claim about rugby:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ1Mt0LdCfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ1Mt0LdCfY)

~~~
untog
Fouls happen. I don't mean to diminish that, but when the base of the game is
to disallow bad tackles then there will be far fewer incidents of bad
tackling.

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imglorp
Pro players are grownups and can make their own decisions about life altering
injuries. But I think we'll see the end of high school football very soon,
when the lawsuits begin and school insurance steps in.

I predict we'll replace it with flag, touch, and rugby and that will be a
further dig to the NFL.

~~~
PopeOfNope
_But I think we 'll see the end of high school football very soon, when the
lawsuits begin and school insurance steps in._

It'll never happen. There's way too much community support for football. And
thank god. There's no other sport out there that teaches you about life quite
like football.

~~~
egypturnash
...Okay. I'll bite. What have I missed learning by never playing or watching
football?

~~~
futbol
Ha! Football truly is so ridiculously complicated that I didn't even try to
learn how it works, and still don't fully understand its absurdities.

Intuitively, as a child, I suspected that football was over rated based on the
apparent reality that it was men running in circles, and then slamming into
each other, without any obvious goal. Randomly a ball would be kicked for any
reason, maybe.

I was 20 years old before I figured out that the basic rules of the game were
4 tries to move the ball 10 yards from the "line of scrimage" before the other
team gets an opportunity to do the opposite. With this in mind add umpteen
thousand technicalities.

More than a decade of elementary school, middle school, high school, video
games, Thanksgivings and Super Bowl Sundays, and no one spelled that out for
me. Not parents, not uncles, not coaches, not friends. I had to dig through a
few books, before picking up some sort of For Dummies/Idiot's Guide book to
find something that clearly stated that.

4 hours of TV time, to express one hour of clocked game play, in which almost
no actual game playing happens. Bah! May as well watch golf.

Oh wait, already do. Yet another awful thing I have to watch at family
gatherings.

~~~
PopeOfNope
We're talking about playing football, not watching it like a lemming. If you
don't know what you're talking about, kindly say nothing.

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ZenoArrow
Off topic but before I knew what the article was about, the title reminded me
of this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MusyO7J2inM)

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PopeOfNope
I don't understand the hard on people around here have for predicting the
collapse of sports. It's like the very idea of getting revenge on the jocks
makes you all salivate. Revenge of the nerds writ large? Or is it an extension
of the 'toxic testosterone' propaganda?

