Your premise is very weak in relation to US sports being a supporting argument.
It comes across as though you've never actually played football or been on a football team. Players on one team largely go out of their way to avoid injuring players on the other team. The vast majority of the game is free motion, not the application of violence. Another large fraction of the game is what can best be described as aggressive shoving and using your body to push or block, not super violent at all.
The quarterback, further, doesn't lead the defense. The job of the offense, which the QB leads, is to score. Ideally that occurs with the minimum amount of violence necessary, not the maximum amount. Offensive players mostly want to avoid that whenever possible. The quarterback does not inherently lead the team and does not lead the defense at all (ie the primary appliers of violence).
The quarterback is popular because he's the center of the offense, which does the scoring, which is exciting. Not because he leads a violent machine. Basketball players in high school that are talented, are equally popular, because scoring points is exciting in every sport.
Hockey is occasionally a quite violent sport. Gretzky wasn't one of the most popular players in hockey history because he was violent - it was because he scored at a rate nobody else ever has. The same goes for Mario Lemieux and countless other scorers.
Baseball is particularly not violent. You know, America's pastime sport that tens of millions of people go to see every year and is wildly popular.
You sound like maybe you've played football. If so, you must recognize that it's nothing particular about any sort of violent acts that makes it so dangerous, but the technique where action at the line teaches driving up from the shoulders to the head which leads to repetitive contact.
The big open-field head-on-head hits are horrific but not the ones that lead to every single brain that's been analyzed showing evidence of CTE.
The NFL will live with having to handle the freak accidents; they can't exist in a world where playing football => long term traumatic brain injury
Perhaps a military metaphor is best —- the QB role is no more violent than Army general, and the players and soldiers are the ones who are most sickened by the violence and injury. That doesn’t change the fact that both football and war have fans who watch on TV and love to see the biggest hits and biggest bombs.
Perhaps an actual argument that supports your claim would be better. You haven't even established for a fact that the US likes violent entertainment more than other nations. So start there before moving on to 1980's teenage comedy notions of high school popularity to explain it.
Given how strongly you talk about football here you must have a good understanding of the sport. How much experience have you had with football, either playing or watching?
A lot of watching, and my claim is only about the fans, not the players, so I’m not sure how any playing experience would help me here. I know that millions of people have watched Lawrence Taylor’s career ending tackle of Joe Thiesmann while Lawrence Taylor has himself never watched it.
It comes across as though you've never actually played football or been on a football team. Players on one team largely go out of their way to avoid injuring players on the other team. The vast majority of the game is free motion, not the application of violence. Another large fraction of the game is what can best be described as aggressive shoving and using your body to push or block, not super violent at all.
The quarterback, further, doesn't lead the defense. The job of the offense, which the QB leads, is to score. Ideally that occurs with the minimum amount of violence necessary, not the maximum amount. Offensive players mostly want to avoid that whenever possible. The quarterback does not inherently lead the team and does not lead the defense at all (ie the primary appliers of violence).
The quarterback is popular because he's the center of the offense, which does the scoring, which is exciting. Not because he leads a violent machine. Basketball players in high school that are talented, are equally popular, because scoring points is exciting in every sport.
Hockey is occasionally a quite violent sport. Gretzky wasn't one of the most popular players in hockey history because he was violent - it was because he scored at a rate nobody else ever has. The same goes for Mario Lemieux and countless other scorers.
Baseball is particularly not violent. You know, America's pastime sport that tens of millions of people go to see every year and is wildly popular.
Basketball is no more violent than soccer.