Posted on 08/23/2015 12:39:56 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
he NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?
By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.
Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
(Excerpt) Read more at grantland.com ...
Bender2 crying?
The talk about concussions didn’t come out of nowhere. The Powers That Be want football eliminated. It’s a long march and has many angles to it, but they want it ended.
I used to pay tag football in the church parking lot on Sunday afternoons. On a concrete parking lot. It's fun to play when you don't have to worry about being tackled. But sometimes, I still get "tagged" pretty hard and sometimes I fall down. But I get back up and keep playing. Playing tag football in the grass will be even more fun.
To answer the question in the headline, it will look like soccer.
How stupid and ignorant we would be.
Nah, think Rugby.
Yep. Too manly, with a clear cut victor.
Napster as a reference doesn’t exactly solidify the argument.
I favor micro-aggression-less football with no scoring, only best hug contests, and everybody gets a trophy at the end of the game.
Have you seen the size of some of those linebackers? A hug from one of them could be fatal.
I think youth football will become tag football... NFL will go on but they will have to have a minor league - colleges will close their programs. This time it really is about the children. IF it turns out to be true that football, played as directed, causes brain injury in all of kids that play it, then it is child abuse to allow kids to play. Period, end of.
And we all had a pretty good idea that football players were dumber when we were in HS, we just didn’t realize it was from the head banging.
Persuasive article.
If you took the damn helmets off, it would help a lot. But they will never do it because they are supposedly for safety. But they cause more injuries. Tough call.
Yes, this article is a workshop in fallacious reasoning.
Rush has been predicting this for quite a while.
The days of building huge stadiums, the teams getting all the revenue and the cities maintaining the stadium is over.
We are facing the Chargers leaving for LA which hasn't had a team for 20 years and thank you they have done very well.
I hope that the taxpayers reject any stadium proposal. It's over.
Good riddance. One of the worst time and money wasters ever invented.
Soccer, if we don't roll back the third-world invasion.
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