Why is Dennis Dodd making an issue of Malcolm Gladwell's comment on football?

Any link as to where and when that actually happened? We'll wait.
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Holy shit. I completely forgot this occured.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/williams/williams020499.htm

 

Not willing to place the bet. Right now, participation is good here, but the serious players are becoming more overwhelmingly black in the south. Suburban High still gets 200 kids out for football, but very few of them will participate in prospect camps, which are overwhelmingly black.

Many of the better white kids, even the stars, are spending their off-seasons playing select baseball or maybe even, in some cases, travel soccer. I saw the same thing happen with basketball. In the 80s and early 90s, you still had a lot of highly competitive mostly white high school basketball teams. But they lacked players whose talents translated to the college game, which led to a decline in participation in the next generation. Now competitive white players down here are rare, white suburban schools are terrible and overall participation levels are declining WAY faster than in football. This is reflected in the NBA where it's hard to find decent white players who aren't foreign or related to a Beach Boy.

I'd say soccer participation would have grown even faster than it has -- especially in the south -- but the opportunity to play at a higher level than grade school isn't very good in that sport either. The SEC doesn't play men's soccer and men's soccer programs are few and far between in the south. If men's soccer becomes a mainstream Division I college sport in the south, I think it would accelerate a decline in white participation in football.

But that's way less of a controversial reason for a slight decline in football participation than concussions.

 

Last. Three. Years.

 

The three years since you gained tunnel vision on the concussion issue.

What else happened in 2009, when the decline began?

* Oh yeah, other sports gained popularity.
* As noted earlier in the thread, the population of males in the playing age has declined (and male athletic participation has declined).
* And oh yeah, in 2009, we hit 10 percent unemployment in the after-effects of a housing bubble that hit the year before. Coaching staffs around the country went through cuts, which meant the elimination of of things like sub-varsity programs in some parts of the country (mostly poor areas). Players from lower-income families became more likely to seek employment to deal with a family financial crisis than participate in extracurricular activities like football.

But no, it has to be concussions, because it fits nicely as a sidebar to the NFL lawsuit story, right?

Because after all, this three-year decline in participation is unprecedented, isn't it?

Actually, it's not.

http://www.nfhs.org/Participation/HistoricalSearch.aspx

In the 37 surveys the NFHS has done on football participation, there has been a decline in participation in 15 times. There has been a stretch of four years in decline once before and another where it was likely a decline five times in six years (at the beginning of that stretch, the surveys were being done every other year).

Let's look at those years periods where we had several consecutive years of declining participation and how it relates to the economy of the period:

1977/78 survey and 1979 -- In the aftermath of the mid-70s recession and with lingering inflation and increased energy costs, participation dwindled by over 100k participants.

1981-82 -- At the tail end of the 70s decline, there was a brief rise in 1980, followed by two more years of participation decline in 81 and 82 following the 1980/81 recession. As the economy recovered, participation increased four of the next six years

89-92 -- followed the 1989 recession, there were four straight years of declining participation.

2009-present -- followed the 2008/09 housing market crumble that resulted in the biggest economic collapse since the depression.

But no, that can't have anything to do with it.

Must. Be. Concussions.

Because. LTL. Says. So.

 

Mmmmm hmmmm. Me and the people who run the leagues.

It is pretty humorous that you can argue all this time with Gladwell's point and the overall appeal of football while then writing:

That's exactly what the prediction is that you're arguing against.

The problem isn't that you disagree with me. The problem is that you disagree with yourself.

Anyway, my bet stands. Five years. Name the stakes. We will look it up.

 

Drip Someone ratted me out to the mods for calling him a nagger. It was scary!

 

I think you're off base here, LTL ... you may be right, but the evidence simply isn't there yet.

These statistics I'm about to proffer are crude, but they're the best I can do given how much y'all are paying me for this consulting gig:

Here are two series of numbers ... total public high school enrollment and the number of kids playing 11-man football.

Year 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Enroll 15081 15087 14980 14995 14668 14530 14512
Football 1071.8 1104.5 1108.3 1112.3 1109.3 1108.4 1096

The proportion (of total enrollment) who are playing football has actually increased since 2006 (from 7.11% to 7.55%), and it's virtually unchanged over the last three years (7.56% in 2010, 7.63% in 2011 and 7.55% in 2012).

Maybe there has been a flight away from football since the concussion stuff came out. But from where I sit the numbers don't show it.

 

Not if he's transgendered -- but not gay -- and loves fire-ass Le ... eh, nevermind.

 

Wow, LTL, you can't tell the difference between an argument that says participation will drop out of the concussion fear and an argument that says participation will drop because of perceptions of race in the sport and perceptions of opportunities.

No wonder you can't see any other possible causes to a relatively moderate decline in participation other than concussions. Despite many other plausible explanations, some of which seem more likely.

Meanwhile, my neighborhood private school's team picture is sitting in front of me. 500 kids in the school (more or less) and 143 boys in the team picture. That means, assuming that the school is roughly 50-50 boy/girl, about 60 percent of the boys in the school are playing.

If not for Junior Seau, they'd all be playing, I'm sure. Because before that, nobody knew football was a dangerous game.

 

Your private school team picture looks like that because those kids were recruited there specifically to play football.

Anyway, we have probably gone as far as we can go. We will look at it in five years. I'm still willing to bet.

 

The thread five years from now will be triggered when Malcolm Gladwell uses the word "barrio" in a documentary about boxing, and Dennis Dodd calls ... I don't know who ... maybe Jesse again, to tell on him.

 

Yeah I saw it the first time. Not much more compelling on repeat.