WickedOrange
2nd String
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To the list of issues that divide the country along partisan lines, you can add an unusual item: football.
Yes, virtually every slice of America still watches football in enormous numbers. But blue America — particularly the highly educated Democratic-leaning areas of major metropolitan areas — is increasingly deciding that it doesn’t want its sons playing football.
The number of boys playing high school football has fallen 15 percent over the last six years in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. The decline in Colorado has been 14 percent. It has been 8 percent in Massachusetts and Maryland, 7 percent in New York and 4 percent in California.
Each of these states voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections, and each is among the more educated states in the nation, measured by the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree.
My colleagues John Branch and Billy Witz recently wrote about the growing number of high school seasons that have been canceled prematurely because the teams could not field enough players deemed to be healthy. Of the nine examples in the article — from the East Coast, the Midwest and the West — eight were in states that voted for President Obama twice. (The exception was Montana.)
Photo
High school football players warming up before a game in Hartselle, Ala., last month.CreditGary Cosby Jr./The Decatur Daily, via Associated Press
“We’re just looking out for their safety,” said Justin Bakkethun, the coach of the Cherry High School team, in Democratic-leaningnortheast Minnesota, which ended its season early.
This column is not meant to be another one heralding the death of football. I don’t have any idea what will happen to football playing and watching over the next few decades. It’s easy to imagine any number of outcomes.
On the one hand, football is akin to a secular religion for many Americans. It’s a tribal way of organizing life, complete with special garments, a sense of identity and weekly rituals. Football has its own annual holidays: the Iron Bowl in late November for Alabama, the Michigan-Ohio State game for the industrial Midwest and the Thanksgiving games and Super Bowl for the entire country.
At a time when audiences for nearly every other form of entertainment are splintering, football’s shows no sign of shrinking. For more than 30 years, I have been part of that audience, watching football, and lots of it, with every close friend or relative I have.
Yet culture can change. As your grandparents can tell you, horse racing, boxing and weekly moviegoing were all once leading forms of entertainment. And when mass culture meets public health, change that once seemed unfathomable can occur pretty rapidly.
Continue reading the main story
Football, Slowly Losing Ground in High Schools
The decline in boys playing high school football has been larger over the past six years than the decline for any other major boys’ sport.
Boys playing each sport, as a percentage of all male high school athletes
2007-08
2013-14
Football
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
Track & field
Wrestling
10%
15
20
25
Source: Analysis of data from National Federation of State High School Associations
Think about smoking or seatbelts. They’re relevant analogies because exhortations to stop smoking and wear seatbelts were once largely relegated to liberal eggheads. As the evidence mounted, though, those causes went mainstream.
Today, it’s clear that a large swath of liberal, college-educated America has changed its mind about the wisdom of playing football. A recent poll conducted by the RAND Corporation for The Upshot asked people about their attitudes toward having their children playing a series of sports. Nationwide, only 55 percent of respondents said they would be comfortable with their sons playing football. The numbers for baseball, basketball, soccer and track were all above 90 percent.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
The concerns about football cut across demographic groups, but they were the most intense among Democratic voters who had graduated from college. In fact, the attitudes of three other groups — Obama voters without a bachelor’s degree, Romney voters without one and Romney voters with one — were strikingly similar. Between 58 percent and 65 percent of each said they would be comfortable with their son playing football. Only 32 percent of 2012 Obama voters with a bachelor’s degree gave that answer.
Football was the only sport for which someone’s political views helped predict their comfort level, Katherine Grace Carman and Michael Pollard of RAND noted. Relative to less violent sports, hockey also had a large percentage of people saying they wouldn’t be comfortable with their child playing. But hockey is less popular— and opinions about it didn’t break along partisan lines.
What happens next? The best guess is probably that the future of football will be decided by medical research. It’s now clear that many N..L. players are at significant risk of brain damage. But we know less about the risks for high school and youth players, who play less and hit less hard, as Jonathan Chait, himself a liberal, noted in a New York magazine essay, “What Liberals Get Wrong About Football.”
Continue reading the main story
The Blue-State Football Blues
Many of the sharpest declines in football participation among high school boys have taken place in states that voted Democratic in recent presidential elections.
Percentage-point change in boys playing each sport, among all boys playing high school sports, from 2007–08 to 2013–14
Colorado
Massachusetts
New Jersey
California
Ohio
Georgia
Pennsylvania
Illinois
Florida
U.S.
New York
Mississippi
Missouri
Texas
North Carolina
-3.2
-2.2
-2.2
-2.1
-2.1
-2.0
-2.0
-1.8
-1.2
-1.2
-1.1
-0.7
-0.7
-0.4
1.3
Source: Analysis of data from National Federation of State High School Associations
It’s entirely possible that further research will show that most levels of football carry risks not wildly different from, say, soccer (with its repeated headers). It’s also possible that a combination of rule changes and new equipment will moderate the dangers of football, including in the N..L. In those cases, football would probably remain a national obsession.
But that’s not the only realistic outcome, no matter how big football is today.
Millions of parents have already decided that youth football brings serious health risks to the brain, and science may ultimately prove those worries correct. If it does, lawsuits will follow on behalf of former players, much as the N..L. has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to injured ex-players. “When universities and school boards have to start paying out substantial settlements, the debate will change,” says Daniel Okrent, who has written histories of both baseball and Prohibition.
For now, most fans are willing to ignore the health damage that N..L. players expose themselves to. We make ourselves feel better by saying that the players know the risks. “I would not let my son play pro football,” Mr. Obama recently told David Remnick of The New Yorker. But N..L. players “know what they’re doing,” the president added. “They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”
Of course, that argument cuts both ways, given the sharp decline in smoking rates over the last few decades.
CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY3COMMENTS
Anyone who insists that football’s future is secure would do well to remember the history of boxing. In the early 20th century, it was one of the country’s major sports, drawing huge crowds, radio audiences and, later, television viewers. My grandfather took a bus from Philadelphia to Yankee Stadium in 1938 to watch Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling. In the 1980s, my father would pop popcorn and let me stay up late watching big fights on HBO.
But eventually, with Muhammad Ali and so many other boxers suffering from obvious brain damage, the problems became too big to ignore. My family — like so many others, regardless of politics, class or region — stopped watching.
Football isn’t doomed to that path, but the sport is not invulnerable, either. Just imagine if you told the 70,000 people in Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, that one day their grandchildren wouldn’t even be able to name the heavyweight champion of the world.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/u...=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1
Yes, virtually every slice of America still watches football in enormous numbers. But blue America — particularly the highly educated Democratic-leaning areas of major metropolitan areas — is increasingly deciding that it doesn’t want its sons playing football.
The number of boys playing high school football has fallen 15 percent over the last six years in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. The decline in Colorado has been 14 percent. It has been 8 percent in Massachusetts and Maryland, 7 percent in New York and 4 percent in California.
Each of these states voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections, and each is among the more educated states in the nation, measured by the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree.
My colleagues John Branch and Billy Witz recently wrote about the growing number of high school seasons that have been canceled prematurely because the teams could not field enough players deemed to be healthy. Of the nine examples in the article — from the East Coast, the Midwest and the West — eight were in states that voted for President Obama twice. (The exception was Montana.)
Photo
High school football players warming up before a game in Hartselle, Ala., last month.CreditGary Cosby Jr./The Decatur Daily, via Associated Press
“We’re just looking out for their safety,” said Justin Bakkethun, the coach of the Cherry High School team, in Democratic-leaningnortheast Minnesota, which ended its season early.
This column is not meant to be another one heralding the death of football. I don’t have any idea what will happen to football playing and watching over the next few decades. It’s easy to imagine any number of outcomes.
On the one hand, football is akin to a secular religion for many Americans. It’s a tribal way of organizing life, complete with special garments, a sense of identity and weekly rituals. Football has its own annual holidays: the Iron Bowl in late November for Alabama, the Michigan-Ohio State game for the industrial Midwest and the Thanksgiving games and Super Bowl for the entire country.
At a time when audiences for nearly every other form of entertainment are splintering, football’s shows no sign of shrinking. For more than 30 years, I have been part of that audience, watching football, and lots of it, with every close friend or relative I have.
Yet culture can change. As your grandparents can tell you, horse racing, boxing and weekly moviegoing were all once leading forms of entertainment. And when mass culture meets public health, change that once seemed unfathomable can occur pretty rapidly.
Continue reading the main story
Football, Slowly Losing Ground in High Schools
The decline in boys playing high school football has been larger over the past six years than the decline for any other major boys’ sport.
Boys playing each sport, as a percentage of all male high school athletes
2007-08
2013-14
Football
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
Track & field
Wrestling
10%
15
20
25
Source: Analysis of data from National Federation of State High School Associations
Think about smoking or seatbelts. They’re relevant analogies because exhortations to stop smoking and wear seatbelts were once largely relegated to liberal eggheads. As the evidence mounted, though, those causes went mainstream.
Today, it’s clear that a large swath of liberal, college-educated America has changed its mind about the wisdom of playing football. A recent poll conducted by the RAND Corporation for The Upshot asked people about their attitudes toward having their children playing a series of sports. Nationwide, only 55 percent of respondents said they would be comfortable with their sons playing football. The numbers for baseball, basketball, soccer and track were all above 90 percent.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
The concerns about football cut across demographic groups, but they were the most intense among Democratic voters who had graduated from college. In fact, the attitudes of three other groups — Obama voters without a bachelor’s degree, Romney voters without one and Romney voters with one — were strikingly similar. Between 58 percent and 65 percent of each said they would be comfortable with their son playing football. Only 32 percent of 2012 Obama voters with a bachelor’s degree gave that answer.
Football was the only sport for which someone’s political views helped predict their comfort level, Katherine Grace Carman and Michael Pollard of RAND noted. Relative to less violent sports, hockey also had a large percentage of people saying they wouldn’t be comfortable with their child playing. But hockey is less popular— and opinions about it didn’t break along partisan lines.
What happens next? The best guess is probably that the future of football will be decided by medical research. It’s now clear that many N..L. players are at significant risk of brain damage. But we know less about the risks for high school and youth players, who play less and hit less hard, as Jonathan Chait, himself a liberal, noted in a New York magazine essay, “What Liberals Get Wrong About Football.”
Continue reading the main story
The Blue-State Football Blues
Many of the sharpest declines in football participation among high school boys have taken place in states that voted Democratic in recent presidential elections.
Percentage-point change in boys playing each sport, among all boys playing high school sports, from 2007–08 to 2013–14
Colorado
Massachusetts
New Jersey
California
Ohio
Georgia
Pennsylvania
Illinois
Florida
U.S.
New York
Mississippi
Missouri
Texas
North Carolina
-3.2
-2.2
-2.2
-2.1
-2.1
-2.0
-2.0
-1.8
-1.2
-1.2
-1.1
-0.7
-0.7
-0.4
1.3
Source: Analysis of data from National Federation of State High School Associations
It’s entirely possible that further research will show that most levels of football carry risks not wildly different from, say, soccer (with its repeated headers). It’s also possible that a combination of rule changes and new equipment will moderate the dangers of football, including in the N..L. In those cases, football would probably remain a national obsession.
But that’s not the only realistic outcome, no matter how big football is today.
Millions of parents have already decided that youth football brings serious health risks to the brain, and science may ultimately prove those worries correct. If it does, lawsuits will follow on behalf of former players, much as the N..L. has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to injured ex-players. “When universities and school boards have to start paying out substantial settlements, the debate will change,” says Daniel Okrent, who has written histories of both baseball and Prohibition.
For now, most fans are willing to ignore the health damage that N..L. players expose themselves to. We make ourselves feel better by saying that the players know the risks. “I would not let my son play pro football,” Mr. Obama recently told David Remnick of The New Yorker. But N..L. players “know what they’re doing,” the president added. “They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?”
Of course, that argument cuts both ways, given the sharp decline in smoking rates over the last few decades.
CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY3COMMENTS
Anyone who insists that football’s future is secure would do well to remember the history of boxing. In the early 20th century, it was one of the country’s major sports, drawing huge crowds, radio audiences and, later, television viewers. My grandfather took a bus from Philadelphia to Yankee Stadium in 1938 to watch Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling. In the 1980s, my father would pop popcorn and let me stay up late watching big fights on HBO.
But eventually, with Muhammad Ali and so many other boxers suffering from obvious brain damage, the problems became too big to ignore. My family — like so many others, regardless of politics, class or region — stopped watching.
Football isn’t doomed to that path, but the sport is not invulnerable, either. Just imagine if you told the 70,000 people in Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, that one day their grandchildren wouldn’t even be able to name the heavyweight champion of the world.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/u...=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1
