Bo Jackson, and What I See as the Future of Football

Earlier this week Bo Jackson, one of the greatest multi-sport athletes of all time, said that he "would never have played football" had he known the risk of head injuries and CTE that are inherent to the game.

Jackson was a true renaissance man within sports. At Auburn University, he ran track, played baseball, and won the Heisman trophy as a running back. He was drafted first overall by the Los Angeles Raiders in 1986, and played both for the Raiders in the NFL and the Kansas City Royals in Major League Baseball simultaneously for four years, until a hip injury prematurely ended his football career. His MLB career continued on for several more years after he recovered from the injury. To this day, he is the only athlete to ever named an All-Star in both the MLB and NFL.

Bo Jackson's comments are significant because they allude to a trend that I foresee happening within the next couple decades: due to increasing awareness of the dangers of head injuries, the best male athletes in the United States will start gravitating towards sports other than football. Jackson was an exceptional athlete, but there are quite a few players currently in the NFL who played other sports at high levels as well. Tight ends Jimmy Graham and Antonio Gates, two of the best players at their position right now and potential hall-of-famers in the future, both played basketball in college. Tom Brady, Colin Kaepernick, Russell Wilson, and Jameis Winston, all current starting NFL quarterbacks, each got selected in the MLB draft at one point. Football is such a versatile sport that its players can succeed in one of the numerous other sports played in the United States.

Therefore, the stark changes in levels of participation will start from the ground up. I think parents, especially of younger kids but even of high schoolers, will be less likely to let their children play football. Thus, the talent pool will somewhat diminish for college programs, and while I don't think the number of players participating will decrease (at least at the Division 1 level), the level of performance will go down because, again, the best athletes will play other sports. This change will extend to the NFL as well.

I've been meaning to write something on where I see the future of football being 15, 20 years down the line. That might not seem like a long amount of time, but the average NFL career is only four years, and outside of quarterbacks and kickers, you have a team of virtually entirely different players every five years or so, let alone every decade. But anyway, eventually, I think football is going to be like what boxing in the US is now. It'll still exist, it'll still be a sport that draws huge crowds and pays large chunks of money for its athletes. It'll still be shown on mainstream television, it'll still be talked about on talk radio and by the water cooler. But it won't be a mainstream sport. It won't be one of the "Big Four," like it is now (for those unfamiliar with the term, the big four refers to the four major professional sports in the United States: football, baseball, basketball, hockey). Kids won't grow up dreaming about catching a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl in the same way that they'd dream about hitting a shot in the NBA finals or a home run in the World Series.

Like boxing is now, football will largely be seen as too barbaric for kids to play. Older high school kids and college-aged students might do it on the side on club teams, but it won't be an official high school or NCAA sport, just like boxing isn't. The kids who do want to seriously pursue football, like many who pursue boxing in the past and nowadays, aren't gonna be ones who see themselves going to college or getting a normal job. They're not gonna plan on having a nice, long, healthy life after their sports careers are over. They're most likely going to be kids who have no desire for anything in the world except to play professional football, and might likely come from poverty or other hardships where football seems like the only way out. This story might seem like a stretch, but the rags-to-riches narrative is one that is already extremely common in the NFL today.

Of course, there are reasons to believe I'm wrong. Maybe scientific advancements with helmet technology, concussion prevention, concussion treatment, and/or CTE treatment will save the game. Obviously, those developments would be nothing short of amazing. But I'm not counting on that, at least not in the short run.

The main reason to believe that I'm wrong about the future of football is that many people either don't understand the risks of head injuries in football, or have some other reasons to ignore the risks if they do understand them. At the risk of getting too political, it reminds me a lot of the climate change "debate." The jury is in on whether preventable human activities contribute to the warming of our planet: they do. But people act like it's still a discussion because either they don't understand climate change, don't care, or have some vested economic interest that incentivizes them to deny science. The same exact thing holds true with football and head injuries.

Thus, I acknowledge that such a big cultural change might not happen so quickly, and it might not happen in a linear fashion. Shoot, we just elected a president who denies the severity of both climate change and of concussions (see the article I wrote back in October on that issue here). It's a gradual process. But look at all the progress that's been made on the concussion crisis. 5 years ago, if an NFL player took a hit to the head and left a big game to get medically evaluated, he would be torn apart by fans and by the media. But today, if a player takes a shot and isn't removed from play, the media is all over it. Just look at what happened this year with Cam Newton, what happened a couple weeks ago with Matt Moore. Overall, that development makes me optimistic.