Football’s future: At what point will there be too many blows to the head?

The talk around the water cooler the day after a Super Bowl in the near future might not be how clever or funny the commercials were or whether there was a wardrobe malfunction during halftime entertainment, but whether the Super Bowl and the teams that make up the NFL have a future that looks anything like the present. In a new report, commissioned by ESPN, respected sports analysts Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada uncover an existential threat to football, with a ripple effect that is finding its way to college football, youth leagues and school districts.

Heading in a direction few could have predicted just a few years ago, football faces the prospect of losing general liability insurance covering head trauma. Where there were once more than a dozen carriers in the market, now the NFL has only one to insure it against claims that could last a player’s lifetime. With the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center claim of approximately 300,000 football-related concussions each year, the lack of insurance coverage could force football’s demise across a wide spectrum of participation.

Insurance companies are in the business of evaluating risk and betting they will make more money on insurance contracts than the claims that inevitably result. Given the uncertainty of exposure down the road to any organization sponsoring football, insurers have labeled football and traumatic brain injury a long tail claim, a sleeping giant, a free-for-all nightmare and a dam built atop an earthquake fault. Not a very good omen for football’s future.

Long before the insurance industry weighed in on the impact of traumatic brain injury and football’s future, the sport was already taking a beating on the concussion issue. Last year, CBS News reported the results of the NFL’s January 2017 concussion settlement, dealing with thousands of lawsuits that accused the NFL of hiding what it knew about the risks of repeated concussions. More than $500 million in claims were approved.

That was the financial impact estimated for 10 years down the road, and it was met in a year’s time. Almost 2,000 claims have been filed in less than two years, significantly ahead of projections.

The canary in the coal mine may well have come from former NFL players themselves, who a few years ago called for the end of tackle football for players 13 and younger. They based their stand on recent medical research and conclusions published in the journal Brain, which contends that children’s bodies, particularly their necks and upper bodies, aren’t strong enough to counteract the bobbling of the head and shaking of the brain that occurs during tackles.

With all due respect and admiration for players stepping forward with a proposal so counter to their own lives in football, it raises the big question: At what age are successive, violent and concussive hits to the head safe for players? Of course, the answer from all the evidence is simply that no one is safe in that kind of environment. Too often, the football game plan leads to a diagnosis of dementia and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). One of the former players who proposed the ban, Hall of Fame linebacker Nick Buoniconti of the Miami Dolphins, now struggles with CTE.

The challenges the NFL faces are not confined to professional football; they have surfaced in college football and youth sports, especially with research released last year finding that CTE has been found in the brains of teens and adults who sustained head injuries, but not necessarily concussions. High school football participation continues its decline for many reasons, but chief among them is parents’ concerns about the safety of the sport. No doubt, the pipeline of young football players will produce fewer prospects for college and NFL ball.

Aside from the plague of concussions and head injuries, the NFL and college football face attendance issues that affect their bottom line.

As TV screens grow larger and more interactive, fans stay at home and get much of the same experience as attending. Or even stranger, fans cart the TV screen to a tailgate spot outside the stadium and watch the game from there. Then there are those pesky millennials who choose to watch games on mobile devices, where they can opt for game summaries and knock off an entire football game in 15 minutes.

These new viewing experiences are having their impact on the traffic at the stadium gate. Fewer fans attended NFL games in 2017 than in 2016, and the numbers were down in 2018 over 2017. Sports Business Daily summed up the problem by reporting that NFL attendance in 2018 was the lowest since 2010.

At the college level, it’s the same discouraging news. Dennis Doss of CBS Sports reported last year that major college football experienced its largest per-game attendance drop in 34 years and second-largest ever, according to recently released NCAA figures.

This leaves football in an interesting position. As it becomes more and more costly to owners to pay out the millions or billions in claims resulting from brain injury, the game will survive only by substantially altering the way it’s played. Rule changes far more drastic than the few the NFL and NCAA have enacted in recent years are in store for the game. And with lawsuits heading all the way down to Pop Warner football, no one can predict that football will be an affordable sport in the future.

As changes take hold, how will the fan react, especially as soccer and lacrosse grow at the college level and serve as harbingers of things to come at the professional level?

Enjoy football’s crowning moment of the season. The times, they are a-changing, Dylan wrote, and change may be the only constant for football in the years ahead.

This story was originally published January 28, 2019 at 3:10 PM.