Too many people are focusing on NFL football

I also is one of them. Because I am a football fanRight now, however, football’s popularity seems invulnerable. The highest rated show on TV last year was Sunday Night Football; it was so highly rated that it, combined with the Super Bowl, kept NBC—NBC!—from finishing last among the four major networks this season. This year’s BCS National Championship was watched by 24.2 million viewers, and that was the lowest rated championship of the BCS era. In a recent piece on football’s popularity for Grantland, Chuck Klosterman pointed out that 25 million people watched the NFL Draft, “a statistic that grows crazier the longer you dwell upon its magnitude.” And, if anything, the football’s popularity seems poised to grow as an influx of popular young stars like Cam Newton, Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, and Tim Tebow enters the league.

All my friends and I like to focus on things like football.
In other words, football’s decline seems both inevitable and impossible. What would need to happen to convince people that something as popular as football is immoral? Some have suggested that it would take an on-field death, or some kind of “conclusive medical proof,” but I think both of these suggestions misunderstand how morals change. People can always find ways to dismiss “proof” when they don’t like the conclusions being proved. And an on-field death, while obviously tragic, could likely be written off as a fluke.

Instead, I think a gradual attrition in kids playing football will be what dooms the sport. Already parents are debating whether or not to let their children play; even an NFL veteran like Bart Scott won’t let his kids play football. I personally can’t imagine letting my kids do it. As parents become more familiar with the health risks, it’s only going to be more common for parents to ban kids from playing football.