The Decline of Football is the Decline of America
California is banning youth tackle football. Asking people to endure pain or sacrifice for their own benefit is the only evil left in modern America.
California’s legislators are considering banning tackle football for youth ages 11 and younger. Of all of the existential problems facing California, Pop Warner football doesn’t make my top 100 list. Yet, that’s what they want to do.
I believe the decline of football is both a symptom of the decline of America, and a precipitating cause. The decline of football can be measured in several ways, from a newfound obsession over gambling, to the fairness and professionalism of referees, and especially the conduct of fans and parents. This essay could be 10,000 words long. But here I’m going to focus on efforts to legislate away the dangers of football, because that’s the issue in front of us… and I have to go shovel some snow later this afternoon.
First, a caveat: football is a dangerous game. There’s a reason there are not many adult football teams, like there are with beer league hockey or indoor soccer. When I am coaching, I explain to players that football is indeed dangerous and the first rule on the field is to defend yourself. At one point in history, it was so dangerous that rule changes were necessary, which gave us the forward pass and lining up properly. In the old days—before refs could steal a win away from the Lions through incompetence about how players are lining up—footballers would run straight out of huddles as mass groups into each other, with none of them lined up across the line of scrimmage. Lots of young men died.
So, yes, football can be dangerous, and sometimes changes are necessary. However, I want to make two points: youth football is not actually that dangerous, and accepting the danger is a valuable and necessary lesson.
It should be obvious that youth tackle football is not that dangerous. I’ve coached 8 years of youth tackle football, including 4 seasons of kids 11 and under. In those years, the 100 or so kids I have coached have suffered one broken arm, one concussion, and one hyper-extended knee. And the knee doesn’t even count; it was from kids farting around with a blocking dummy before practice started. I have seen kids more banged up from playing “sharks and minnows” during flag football practice, or the playground.
Certainly more dangerous than football for elementary kids is middle school football, followed by high school football. Then you get to college football, where you see players really start to be exposed to injuries that are life-long and require surgeries. Then you come to the NFL, where it seems most players who stick in the league are fated for at least multiple minor surgeries. Football players who are twice as fast and twice as big are able to hit with four times the force of smaller, younger players. Plus, these older players are practicing twice as much, and playing twice as many plays in a game as their younger counterparts. So, that’s 16 times more physical contact.
So, if we need to ban football in the name of safety, why not ban the NFL? Too much money involved. College football? Again, way too much money now, and the colleges that foster our society’s safety-first obsession are too deep into it to stop themselves now.
But what about high school football? That’s where the injury potential really starts ramping up. High school football games—at least in Michigan—often have an ambulance on standby, while youth tackle football teams don’t even have trainers. I have a first aid kit in my coaching bag that’s been used to tape one jammed finger in multiple seasons. I have seen two kids carted off for neck injuries in high school football games (both were ultimately fine). So, why aren’t they banning high school football first? Well, again, I think there’s some mitigating circumstances there, including the fact that high school students are old enough to protest.
Banning the safest form of tackle football in the name of safety doesn’t make sense purely as public policy, but it does make sense if you gradually want to choke off the supply of football players. It makes great sense to create a narrative that this is all “for the children,” as well as giving mothers a more plausible excuse to tell older kids they can’t play. “Why, little Johnny, it’s not even safe for 10-year kids! You want me to let you play against even bigger, meaner kids?” It’s the path of least resistance, the proverbial foot in the door.
To reinforce this narrative, that one center in Boston that is on a crusade against football has released studies to bolster the claim that exposure to football at a young age causes devastating and debilitating effects down the road. If my characterization of Boston University’s specialized brain injury research institute sounds a bit hyperbolic, you’re right. But I do it because hyperbole is their currency: when you look at the “studies” they promote to make their case, it is more media sensationalism than rigorous research.
When mind-numbed drones repeat the mantra they heard that “research shows” football is dangerous for kids, they seem to be referring to two “studies,” both by the Boston U anti-football center. Both involved small groups of NFL players. One was based entirely on telephone interviews. Telephone interviews. When people hear the words “research” and “study,” they should rightly expect thousands of cases based on brain tissue, long-term health cataloguing, control groups, MRI scans; you know, science crap. They don’t think it involves asking a couple dozen guys who came to them questions over the phone. A quick Google search will show you media coverage that claims “lots” of this new research has been done. Well, shoot, if 50 phone calls is a lot of research, I’m something of a peer-reviewed researcher myself.
It’s media sensationalism. It’s not honest, long-term, carefully conducted research, after which we have frank discussions and argue about the right conclusions; it’s conclusions in search of research to sway average citizens with the cache and magic of the word “science.” It’s no different in kind from using a public health panic propagated through the media to tell people “masks work, so you better wear it or else,” or “remember to social distance at least six feet!” That people fall for the same trick over and over is so depressing, but that’s life in modern America.
Nobody should be surprised that the longer you play football, the more dangerous it is, and that those who choose to play in the NFL are putting themselves at great risk. Nobody is shocked that boxing or MMA might be extremely dangerous, or that sky diving carries some risks.
But the claim that youth football is causing a hidden epidemic of human misery is preposterous. We’ve had youth tackle football for more than a century now; where are all the dead men? Millions upon millions of men have played youth football, right up through high school, yet women experience dementia at greater rates than men. Shouldn’t we have seen millions of men slobbering in a chair, unable to remember their own names by now, if they are getting CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) from 5th grade rocket football? Where are the bodies?
If youth football isn’t as dangerous for your brain as being female, then it’s not really dangerous.
Yes, four years of high school football came with some bad bumps and bruises for myself, and I only played half as much as a lot of guys. But the most debilitating long-term injuries I have experienced were from otherwise mundane things. These things include playing catch, non-contact sports, ill-fitting shoes, not sitting in a chair properly. The list goes on, as I approach my 40s this year.
What’s killing people today is pretty obvious, but we don’t do much about it. Screen time. Fentanyl. Cheap junk food. White collar professions. Suicide. In fact, it’s so obvious, that only now, after 150 years of tackle football, have American men (and women) seen declining life expectancy. Where are the bodies? Why, they are really piling up now! California will spend tax money on helping homeless people shoot up on the street while telling people it’s a crime to let kids tackle each other. This is madness. Madness!
They are not trying to ban youth football because of the inherent danger of it. They want to ban youth football to get at all of football, and it’s because of the appearance of danger. To many, football seems like a barbaric throwback to the Roman Empire. It seems anachronistic. It probably fuels toxic masculinity, or something.
In short, tackle football offends metropolitan, effete, international sensibilities. Such an orgy of violence has no place in the modern, safe world they seek to build. The prevailing mindset in our institutions is safety first. But I say “safety third!” Yes, safety third.
I once again concede that football is a dangerous sport. But the danger is the point. It’s why football is so special, and why it’s a young man’s game that can’t be enjoyed later in life like other sports and games.
Other sports ask a lot from you. How you get better at them is practice and self discipline. Those are good virtues. And I love these other sports. I have played lacrosse, baseball, soccer, and track as a youth. But nothing is quite like football. It asks you to be willing to endure pain for the success of the team. It asks you to accept a sacrifice to achieve your broader goal. It asks most of us to be willing to take on a larger man we can’t truly defeat on our own. Are you willing to take the hit?
That simply won’t do in these modern times. All of our society is built on puffing up people’s self esteem without achievement: to focus on themselves. The only evil left in modern America is the idea that enduring pain or sacrifice can be a positive experience. If there is no afterlife, nobody to remember you, and no greater meaning besides the next dopamine hit, then doing anything that jeopardizing that sweet, sweet dopamine is a bad proposition.
A safety-first society has terrible negative consequences. It makes us accepting of weakness. It makes us fear the future. It causes us to engage in behavior that can have drastically worse outcomes than accepting the danger in the first place. We’ve become the kind of nation that will destroy kids’ education for an entire generation instead of facing a respiratory virus that would be a footnote in any other historical period, if mentioned at all.
Instead, we should subscribe to Mike Rowe’s mantra of “safety third.” Safety is an important thing, but it’s not the most important thing. We willingly engage in dangerous behaviors because we accept their costs. Safety is not the responsibility of some bureaucrat or legislature, but of each person for themselves—and their immediate colleagues.
To twist Ben Franklin’s iconic phrase a bit, those who would give up a vigorous life to purchase a little temporary safety, will have neither life nor safety in the end.
I’m not asking to keep gladiatorial combat legal here, where we throw slaves to the lions for cheap entertainment. I’m asking for you not to make it a crime to have little Timmy play football for 90 minutes on a Saturday morning. Sure, he might get a boo-boo, but he will quickly forget it when the moms show up during the post-game speech with Gatorade and cookies. If that sugar rush doesn’t banish away the unpleasantness of the morning’s death-defying feat, anesthetizing little Timmy with 16 hours of Roblox for the rest of the weekend will.
It was said that Britain won the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon on the playing fields of Eton. What kids do with their time really does matter for entire nations. If America has grown so decadent that it can no longer abide the rough and tumble of youth football, how it will summon the courage to address our coming demographic crisis? How will it deal with our entitlements going bankrupt? How can it win conflict in the Middle East or fighting China in the Pacific?
The greatest virtue lacking in America today is courage, and football can teach kids greater confidence in spades. So, don’t be afraid to let your kids play football. Don’t let them legislate away a great opportunity to learn the valuable lesson that there are far worse fears than a little pain, and far worse sufferings in store for those who aren’t willing to suffer just a little.