New Football League (from the people that brought you the XFL)

[Martinjmpr]

More and more parents aren't letting their kids play football anymore. Quality talented QB's have been marginally thin for years and it's expected to get worse. In the next 15-30 years I think we will see the quality of the NFL and college product really drop. Won't be surprised to see the NFL dissolve entirely.

Yes, I've heard the same thing. As far as the future of the NFL, that's going to really depend, IMO, on what colleges and universities do. After all, colleges are the "farm teams" for the NFL.

A few random thoughts occur to me:

If you think about it, it's the college football programs that really do the "heavy lifting" when it comes to both finding and making new talent - NFL just swoops in afterwards and cherry picks the best players out of a huge pool (except for the VERY few players who go straight from High School to NFL - but isn't that like a fraction of a percent?)

But...colleges and universities - especially big public universities - are so hooked on all the money that college football brings in, that it's hard to imagine them walking away from that money.

The big question is going to be, what will college football programs do if middle-class parents start keeping their boys out of football for fear of head injuries? The only thing I can think of is that they will move "down market" in terms of recruiting. IOW, when the middle-class Suburban and small-town high schools start ending their football programs due to not having enough players, colleges and universities will have to try to move into the inner cities and poorer parts of the country where people might be more willing to risk a life-changing injury if it's their only shot at improving their economic status. But that brings its own problems, not the least of which is that kids from those schools are less likely to be successful in college which means that the colleges will have to "dumb down" their academic programs in order to keep the players from getting cut.

Who knows? If it gets bad enough, colleges may eventually drop the pretext that players are "students" and simply hire them to play football as professionals.

The other possibility, I suppose, is that something replaces Football as a popular spectator sport. Soccer? It's possible, I guess. To me watching soccer is about as interesting as watching paint dry but then again, I could say that about a lot of other sports, too. Certainly soccer is popular enough in the rest of the world that it's a major, major sport that makes billions of $$ for a lot of people.

And if you think about it, football really hasn't been a major spectator sport for all that long. I think the NFL goes back to, what, 1960 or so? So just 60 years. If you look back to the time before and after WWII, baseball was the "national pastime" and the biggest spectator sporting event in the country, for a LONG time. There are lots of people alive today (my parents, for example, both in their 80's) who can remember a time when football was a little-known and little-cared-about sport played at high schools and colleges in front of small crowds.