The end of football?

I'd love to see an analysis of youth players' academic progress before and after they start playing football.

 

Professional football has been played for almost 95 years.
Why has this become such a hot-button issue in the last two?

 

Because we know more about concussions than we did before.

Because the players continue to get bigger, faster and stronger than they were before.

And because the soccer moms have finally got their way in their decades-long war against football (j/k, but I know of a few soccer evangelists in my community who used to call me all the time and complain that, if we covered soccer like we covered football, and they got Friday-night billing instead of the Neanderthals slamming into each other, then soccer would bigger crowds because it's a "better sport.")

The last was a joke ... sort of .

 

I've always used "wimpification," but your word works, too.

 

PC, boxing and horse racing never had a whisper of the passionate following football does.

Nobody on this board will see the demise of it.

 

How do you know?

More head injuries have been caused by head-to-head, head-to-post or head-to-ground contact that it does from repeated headings ... at least given the current level of research.

The only way we'll know that is to follow this for years and years, tracking how many years someone played the game and how frequently that someone headed the ball. Given the information we have now, the other issues - head-to-head, head-to-post and head-to-ground - has caused much more damage that repeatedly heading the ball during a match or over a series of matches.