(
)
(
)
Football, watched by two-thirds of Americans and generating annual revenues approaching $10 billion for the National Football League, has strangely been relegated to sports’ endangered-species list.
The game’s existential threats include a lawsuit brought against the NFL by more than 4,000 former players alleging that the league hid occupational hazards that led to brain damage. Science’s exploration of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in deceased football players has led pundits to link off-field violence to on-field trauma. The suicides of Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and other players suffering from CTE similarly have forced some to rethink the ethics of watching the sport.
The attacks on the big boys’ league have resulted in collateral damage for kids’ leagues. Bronx Assemblyman Michael Benedetto introduced legislation earlier this year to ban football for children under 11. School-board members in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania made headlines by seeking to ban the sport.
The concern even reaches the highest levels of government. “If I had a son,” President Obama remarked earlier this year, “I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football.”
Many parents have been doing just that. Participation in youth football declined by 6% last season. As teams start practice this month, many coaches admit difficulty in fielding a scrub squad to shine-up their starters.
“I definitely see that the numbers are dropping,” observes Jeff Tatusko, president of the Greater 28 Youth Football League in Western Pennsylvania. “We had 10 teams in the [13-year-old] league last year. We’re down to seven this year.”
For critics who believe that dwindling numbers represent healthier minds and bodies, the slow extinction of youth football provides reason to cheer.
Calling the sport an “anachronism,” writer Malcolm Gladwell recently said on CNN that “there is just no conceivable argument to continue to practice this inhumane spectacle.” He urges educational institutions to tell their student-athletes that they can’t play.
About 4 million Americans play tackle football, most of them young people. Only about one in every 50 players can legally buy alcohol.
Yet for all the headlines, not a single player on a sandlot, high-school or college team died from a football hit last year. More kids died from lightning strikes on football fields last season than from getting struck by other players.
By way of comparison, football hits killed 36 players in 1968. In the last decade, total fatalities from contact have averaged 3.7 per year — about a tenth of what they were in football’s deadliest season. Football hits over the last decade killed one-sixth the number of players as they did during the 1960s, one-fourth the number of players as they did during the 1970s, and one-half the number of players as they did during the 1980s.
The trend follows better rules (the NCAA codified penalties against crown-first spearing hits in the early 1970s), equipment (competitors transitioned from webbed-suspension to padded helmets during the 1970s), and coaching (the current emphasis on heads-up tackling). The game plays dramatically safer than it once did.
Meanwhile, many childhood activities that parents deem beneficial or at least benign prove far deadlier. Thirty skateboarders suffered fatal injuries in America in 2012. About half a dozen kids die on US playgrounds every year. At least eight American students died during gym class this past school year. Neither headlines nor a movement arose calling to ban those activities in spite of the greater loss of life than football hits. People intuitively grasp that physical education and monkey bars provide benefits that outweigh costs. That risk/reward quotient strangely remains absent from the gridiron debate.
Football abolitionists maintain that while hits may no longer kill many athletes on the field, they exact excruciating punishments later. An oft-repeated claim posits that football curtails the lives of former pros by decades.
“Playing football at an elite level, in college or at the pro level, has all kinds of long-term health consequences,” Malcolm Gladwell told Fareed Zakaria in his recent CNN interview. “We know from doing long-term epidemiological studies that there’s a rate of injury, a rate of disability, a rate of early death.”
Sherry Baron, the lead author of a 2012 study on player mortality by the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health, occasionally comes across claims such as Gladwell’s that mesh with conventional wisdom but clash with the science.
“The reason why we decided to do this study is that there was such a strong belief that professional football players had an average life expectancy in their 50s,” she says. “We did a fairly systematic review where that statistic may have come from and determined that it was not based upon a systematic mortality study like the one we conducted.”
In other words, studies that never existed somehow have taken on a life of their own.
Baron’s mortality study shows that professional football players outlive comparable American men. At the behest of the NFL Players Association, Baron’s team of government scientists investigated 3,439 pension-vested NFL retirees who played in five or more seasons between 1959 and 1988. They didn’t find what the union, or even many casual fans, imagined they would. The scientists expected to find 625 deaths based on the prevailing rates among similar men. Baron’s group found 334 player deaths. The retired-athlete cohort exhibited diminished rates of cancer, heart disease and even suicide.
Football is good for you.
Partisans looking to rally the harried game might discover in its 144-year past the best reasons for it enjoying a future. Football presents the story of the counted out coming back.
Football is Michael Oher, who transcended homelessness, an inmate father’s murder, and a mother’s crack addiction to win unanimous All-American honors and a Super Bowl ring. Football is the courage of Harvard, Yale and Princeton’s varsity teams enlisting en masse for the First World War, and the leadership of a West Point player who dreamed of beating Navy beating Nazis by overseeing the D-Day invasion. Football is the Saints energizing a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans in its Super Bowl run, proving that a mere game can uplift entire cities.
Football is a rough-and-tumble game; that’s why Americans like it. But as long as the sport uses the safety precautions it’s already instituted, is it really worth throwing out a game that’s exercise for increasingly obese children, a reason to go outside for kids addicted to iPhones, a chance for families to get together and cheer for the underdog?
Youth football is worth saving.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of “The War on Football: Saving America’s Game” (Regnery), out this week.