Pat Reusse: Football's expiration date not as far off as you think; 2 decades left

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If football has to change to survive, it will change and survive. The demand for football isn't going away.

The wishbone was once a radical futuristic offense. Now people joke about using something as ancient as the wishbone. The game will be different in the future, but it has always changed.

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imthewalrus said:
My guess is that within 20 to 30 years, if not sooner, many of us here on GH, myself included won't really be too passionate about what happens to college football...or most anything else. One reason for optimism might be the incredible rise in "FANTASY" football..., "fantasy" four and five star high school recruiting and the eventual development of robotics and artificial intelligence. There may eventually be NO need for human brains to slosh around in craniums as real people no longer put their delicate condition at risk. Maybe for you youngsters, you will see some pretty slick robo-five star recruits donning the Maroon & Gold for the engineering department's scheduled Game Day Saturday competition against the stinking badger engineering department's smash-mouth Ron Dayne clone job prototype computerized self-sustaining entry in 2040 Big Ten Concussion-Free Football Conference. No fans will have actually attend these contests...so...no one will be able to kick around the Student Section's poor attendance at these spirited events. Clones...drones...and smart chips will cheer and: "fight on for the old Maroon & Gold..."
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▲Doesn't understand what fantasy football is
 

Clearly Mr. Reusse never saw The Jetsons episode when George & Mr. Spacely lie to their wives about previous engagements and go to a ROBOT FOOTBALL GAME.

Clones may cause an ethical dilemma in the future, but they will at least satisfy my craving of getting to watch the '72 Dolphins take on the '04 Vikings...
 


RodentRampage said:
If football has to change to survive, it will change and survive. The demand for football isn't going away.

The wishbone was once a radical futuristic offense. Now people joke about using something as ancient as the wishbone. The game will be different in the future, but it has always changed.

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Imagine the look on Vince Lombardi's face if you were to tell him a QB would have 5,000 passing yards in a season.
 


short ornery norwegian said:
I think some of the decline in FB # may be due to concerns about injuries.
BUT, there are other factors: (in no particular order)
1. Specialization. Far fewer 2- and 3-sport athletes, especially in the big schools. with the rise of summer programs, AAU etc, you have kids who are
choosing one sport and basically playing that sport year-round. Lot of good athletes in hockey and WR who don't play FB anymore.
2. Lazy kids. I maintain some kids use "injuries" as an excuse to avoid going out for FB, because they don't want to work that hard. They'd rather \
sit at home playing video games and binge-watching Netflix.
3. Don't want to play on a bad team. I realize even EP is seeing a drop in #, but in outstate MN, the programs that are struggling with numbers
almost always are teams with losing traditions. Teams that win and go to the playoffs on a regular basis get more kids out. Teams that go
0-8 or 1-7 in the regular season have a lot more trouble getting kids to go out for FB.
4. Population trends. In outstate MN, there are smaller rural districts that have falling enrollment. Fewer kids in school = fewer kids available to
play FB. And, you might get a class that is 60% girls/40% boys. get a couple of classes like that in a row, and you get some empty grades on
the FB roster.
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I will also add that there are a lot more options for kids now days. 20-30 years ago there weren't nearly as many different sports/activities for kids as there are now. So a kid that maybe isn't the biggest or best athlete for his age may want to do something different than play football.
 

GophersInIowa said:
I will also add that there are a lot more options for kids now days. 20-30 years ago there weren't nearly as many different sports/activities for kids as there are now. So a kid that maybe isn't the biggest or best athlete for his age may want to do something different than play football.
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But what really only matters is whether the best will gravitate to other sports more than they do now. My guess is no, not many D-1 football players will be playing other sports. The depth at the high school level may go down but D-1 will still be the same. Losing high schools numbers is likely fine- football is one of the least fun sports if you are marginal in talent (or so my friend told me).
 

Winnipegopher said:
The depth at the high school level may go down but D-1 will still be the same. Losing high schools numbers is likely fine
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These are excellent points. Look at the NCAA Research from 2013:

https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Probability-of-going-pro-methodology_Update2013.pdf

Percent of HS players who go on to the NCAA: 6.5%
Percent of NCAA players who play professionally: 1.6%
Percent of HS players who play professionally: 0.08%

Looking at the last data point, that means that 1 in every 1,250 HS football players end up in the NFL. Another way of saying this is that there is a pool of 1,250 HS players from which NFL front offices can select each and every roster spot in the league. Even if the HS participation numbers are cut in half (which will never happen), there will still be 625 HS players for every NFL roster spot. Football isn't going anywhere for a long, long time.
 

Reusse's expiration date will come before football's


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Fox has been showing us the dancing football robots every week to desensitize us to the shock of future football.
 


Minnesota participation is up from last year 25,487 in 2014 25,690 in 2015. So there are your facts patrick
 



I have often wondered if they put a weight limit in the NFL if it would slow down injuries? Anyway, football is America's pastime and I don't see it ending any time soon. A few rules may be tweaked for safety reasons and a few more dollars may be put away by the NFL to pay off lawsuits, but the most popular sport in America is not going anywhere. And since my wife worked in the front office of two NFL teams and is fully vested with NFL pensions, we need the NFL to live a long and fruitful life.
 

Boxing didn't die either, but it's popularity severely dropped.
 

station19 said:
Boxing didn't die either, but it's popularity severely dropped.
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Boxing's popularity dropped because it's terribly corrupt, and there became more and more "sanctioning bodies" each with their own "world champions." It's one thing the UFC has done well. Dana White is a d-bag, but he's more or less consolidated all the top MMA talent into the UFC. There are other lesser promotions, but the only major league at this point is UFC. The other issue with boxing is that the most historically popular division, Heavyweight, has been a slogging bore for years. It's dominated by Europeans who don't fight much in the US and nobody here wants to pay to see. The biggest money boxer here is Mayweather, and for all the money his fights make, he's also terribly dull.

Basically, MMA has replaced boxing at this point. Arguably the most marketable female athlete in the world right now is Ronda Rousey. It doesn't hurt that she's hot of course, but she's still a fighter, and a very popular one at that.
 

Ok, now that I derailed the thread with the boxing rant… :)

My son is three, and if he wants to play football when he gets older, I'm fine with that. I played tackle football from 4th grade through my senior year in high school, and I loved it, and have great memories of it. I played a bunch of other sports in school, but football was the only one I stuck with all the way. (I had no desire to play in college, and was definitely too small to play O-line at the D2 college I attended anyway). Football is fun. School age guys are aggressive, and the game is a great way to harness that in a constructive team setting.

I do think there's some merit to the argument that SOME parents aren't letting their kids play football now, but there were parents when I was in school 25-30 years ago that didn't let their kids play football either. That will always be the case. I do think that the point of sports specialization is really the key reason for any present or future decline in the game. I've often said that football is the last sport that resembles the era in which I was in school, where you played a sport for a season, and went on to the next season/sport. Pretty much every other sport (except maybe golf) has become a year-round deal for kids as young as grade school. With traveling teams, AAU, camps etc., kids are expected to dedicate their lives to one thing all year. When you have that level of specialization, there's no time away from it to play other sports, and football is going to be the one to suffer. When your peers on the wrestling/basketball/swimming/hockey teams are spending the fall preparing for their season, and you're playing football, what's going to happen to your spot on those teams come winter? You saw the start of it when I was in school, where the serious hockey/hoops players stopped playing football because of a slight overlap in the seasons and the risk of getting cut from the teams because they were still playing football. Personally I think it's sad, and a lot of kids are missing out on fun experiences because of this, but that's the world we live in, particularly in larger suburban districts.

Football may or may not be declining, but if it is, it's a far more compiex issue than Pat's simplistic column. (and I'm normally one of the few defenders of Reusse here - I think he's a good writer).
 

In twenty years from now, my biggest worry is a leaky Depends and where the h#ll my specs disappear to.

There will always be sports for the youths. It is good for them. Like everything else moderation is the key. There are concussion risks in soccer, la crosse, running, cycling, etc..., skate boarding, snowboarding, as well as falling off your bike.

Football will adapt and survive. In over fifty years of watching football, it has become an arms race. Players are lifting weights and bulking up now even at the high school level. Programs use plyometrics and other techniques to get bigger, faster, and stronger. There in lies the problem. There are greater chances for serious injuries due to the speed of the game. On the other hand, proper strength and conditioning programs help prevent injuries. It is a double-edged sword. The risks for concussions will increase without proper coaching and training.

Didn't Nebraska start this trend in college football in their hay day? Now, every major college football programs and power HS programs in the country have emulated or surpassed them.

Jerry Kill and others emphasize proper tackling to minimize serious injuries.

Rules have change like spearing and blows to the head are caused for severe penalties including ejection and suspension. Is this enough?

Concussion related injuries aside, there is a reason why sports medicine is big business. My hunch is they are busier than ever with the changes in speed, size, and strengths of athletes with maybe higher levels of injuries. This is just a guess. I've had numerous treatments related to recreational running & after my back surgery. I have seen too many HS and former college football, hockey, and soccer players as well as former pro football players during my visits to PTs & orthopedics physicians.

Has anyone looked at the weight/height distribution of let's say the Minnesota Vikings by positions over the last five decades? I would not be surprise if at certain positions the change is significant.
 

station19 said:
Boxing didn't die either, but it's popularity severely dropped.
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And got replaced with a more violent alternative....

It'd be interesting to see the replacement for football. I'm thinking James Caan & Rollerball mixed with RB Billy Cole running down the field with a football in one hand & a gun in the other.

Water's wet, sky's blue, football will continue...
 

Boxing is not a fair comparison. It only requires 1 person per team.


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For football to go the way of the dodo it would have to first lose it's spot as the most popular spectator sport in the US. Even at the High School level it's the only sport that can consistently draw non-parents to watch. Different areas might have other sports that draw okay. Hockey here, Lacrosse out east, but nothing is close to football at the combined high school, college, pro level. Great athletes are drawn to that and the fame and money that goes with it. No one plays this sport and sits in an ice tub to recover just to play in front of Mom and Dad. When TV contracts start going down for pro and college, then I'll believe this sport is trending away. I would bet it's headed the other way and you will see double the coverage of High School games on ESPN in the next 5 years.
 

gopherhoopsguy said:
Minnesota participation is up from last year 25,487 in 2014 25,690 in 2015. So there are your facts patrick
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To be fair, that's only a 0.79% increase I'm sure an argument could be made that statistically speaking it is no change.
 

The chiropractor lobby is to big for football to go away.


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Football is a tough game, but the idea that most kids playing it endangers their mental health is completely unsupported. I believe at all levels there is less constant full speed contact during practices. The other side of the is the training available has made the size and speed of the players much greater than ever before which has to add to the shock of a collision.
There is not even that much evidence that college football players suffer long term mental health issues, because it is for four/five years. Further, the treatment of concussions has been getting much more aggressive for at least a decade. We have guys ruled out permanently, or for a season, etc. when I do not remember that ever happening 40 years ago. I guess Kent Kitzman is one exception, great TB for Cal Stoll who quit because of headaches.
I do believe pro football will have serious problems at some point with cumulative trauma experienced by all linemen and linebackers who play for long periods. I actually think anyone who can play pro football and especially if they play those positions should seriously consider playing about 5 years and hanging it up; sooner if they have multiple concussions.
I would expect some big changes going forward in technology, e.g. soft helmets for practices, and at some point accelerometer or some other device attached to helmets that will measure cumulative shock absorbed where guys are limited in the amount of shock they can receive; about like innings pitched in baseball.
 

Please keep in mind that Reusse always wants to gore someone else ox. The only sport he actually likes now is baseball. I would like someone to remind Reusse that people used to love baseball; black kids don't play it anymore and white kids only play it when their organized teams play. I don't believe football is any more endangered than baseball, even if it is for different reasons. As opposed to Andy MacPhail's statement, the most over rated executive in major league history, I can't remember why I ever liked watching baseball, I would rather paint the house than watch a baseball game on TV.
 

I'm a fan of most of Pat's writing and think his observations are on the mark. I think he's missed it here. An anecdotal counter point sound be schools like New Ulm Cathedral or Sleepy Eye St Mary's where there is a nearly 100% participation rate.

Teddy Roosevelt wanted to outlaw football because people were dying playing the game. No more running starts. The concussion issue is overblown. Patrick had a real chip on his shoulder for all things football these days. If you think Gopher sports are targeted, listen to the vitriol he directs at the Vikings and the NFL these days. That disdain colors this article.
 

Rescooter said:
As a service to GH, interpretation of the above: wren says there will be robots in the future and they will play football.

.-- .-. . -. .. ... - .... . ...- .. .-.. .-.. .- --. . .. -.. .. --- -

;0)
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You still remember how to speak wren?
 

IMO, football will be a southern sport as the rest of the nation will play other sports.
 

Killjoy said:
You still remember how to speak wren?
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I still do - kind of like riding a bike.

Some of our customers babble like he does, so its useful. The Morse Code bit is a new wrenism.
 

As a society we have lost the ability to put risk in perspective. What are the odds of post-concussive disorder? What are the odds of CTE and can it be definitely linked to mental status?

What if I told the average person there is a lifetime risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident of all types of 1 in 112. The risk of TBI from car accident 1 in 1000, per year. Would that alter driving frequency.

Sitting on a couch or at a desk, eating garbage, stress all contribute to early development of diabetes, coronary artery disease, etc etc. Nobody gets out of life alive. Live while you can and contact sports are a big part of that. Unless legislated away football is going nowhere.
 

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