Two new polls reveal that, while Americans continue to love watching football, lingering concern about the long-term impact of concussions is changing their outlook on the game.
Forty-eight percent of all Americans and 46 percent of all parents say that they would encourage a child interested in playing football to pursue another sport, according to a new poll by NBC News/Wall Street Journal. This marks an increase of nine percentage points among all parents and an increase of eight percentage points among all Americans since 2014. The figures also included 53 percent of mothers and 39 percent of fathers who said that they would want their child to play a different sport to avoid concussions. Only 33 percent of fathers would support their child's decision, meaning even that even among that comparatively favorable group, there were still more of them opposed than supportive.
The poll also found that Americans tend to disapprove of how the NFL has addressed concerns about concussions. There was a drop in eight percentage points since 2014 in the Americans who believed that the NFL had taken meaningful action to reduce and prevent concussions, from 41 percent to 33 percent. By contrast, 28 percent said that the NFL has not taken meaningful action, an increase in eight percentage points since 2014.
Even the legendary, hard-nosed, hard-driving quarterback Brett Farve has become among those who doubt football's future as a youth sport, saying that he cringes when he sees, "little kids out playing, and they’re all decked out in their football gear and the helmet looks like it’s three times bigger than they are. It’s kind of funny, but it’s not as funny now as it was years ago, because of what we know now." He continues, "I just cringe seeing a fragile little boy get tackled and the people ooh and ahh and they just don’t know. Or they don’t care. It’s just so scary."
What this points to is a future of possibly fewer children entering the game, fewer teens becoming fully fluent in it by high-school graduation, fewer collegiate athletes reaching the same levels of excellence as had been seen in previous generations and thus, in time, a poorer final product at the professional level, one that may not be able to sustain the outsized ratings and profits the league currently maintains. Should this grim vision come to pass, it would create a feedback loop of lessened general interest leading to successive generations of smaller talent pools and play of diminished quality, thus leading to even less interest.
Yet not all of the recent polling has bad news for the state of football. PRRI's 2017 and 2018 annual sports and society poll found that 38 percent of Americans prefer to watch football over any other sport, which is just 3 percentage points shy of the combined percentage of Americans who prefer auto racing, baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer (41 percent).
In the end, football is still America's game, but it's future in America is appears very much in doubt.
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