How easy is banning football?

Jim poses an interesting argument to banning football below. I started this post as a reply to Jim’s post, I feel like it’s got enough meat in it to serve as its own separate post.

I wanted to play football as a kid. My mom wouldn't let me, because she was a guidance counselor, and she watched one of her students die on the field of a broken neck. Of all the kids, I had to be the one with the responsible parent...

The idea of banning high school and below football has pretty far-reaching impacts that could go beyond football. I guess the question is, if you're going to ban football for minors, what do you have to ban beyond that? Hockey? Baseball? I played baseball up to high school and saw several kids hit in the head, either by pitches or by hard line drives.

An interesting possible solution to this beyond Patrick’s mention of rule changes across the board would be sweeping rule changes at the Pop Warner and high school level. Make it a non-contact game until they get into college. The argument would be “How much can it really prepare someone to play at the college/professional level?” As mentioned, we ban smoking and alcohol for minors. However, we don’t have professional smoking or drinking leagues, and I think we all know how pervasive underage smoking and drinking is.

I don't know if anyone here watches Penn & Teller's "Bullshit." It's on Showtime, a half an hour adult comedy/documentary series designed to debunk popular rumors like the end of the Mayan calendar/world and how good organic food really is for you. I catch it every so often when I like the subject.

They did an episode on video games, specifically on video game violence causing real violence. At the end of the episode, I thought they did a quite powerful summation of the issue, relating it to football. You can watch the clip here.

It's a sticky subject. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the sentiment of banning the sport, or at least the version we're playing now. But logistically you're not talking about simply throwing a switch and making everything stop. You're talking about a ban on a major staple in our way of life. You're talking about a ban on something that would have a MASSIVE economic impact. Right or wrong, it wouldn't be easy to actually execute, and you can of course be certain it would be met with great resistance.

The resistance is going to be the most difficult thing to overcome in this. Not because of how engrained it is in our world. But because the resistance is going to come from the people that are actually playing the sport! We are clamoring for change, but – unless I am wrong – none of the three of us have children playing football right now. The parents who would want the change will pull their kids out of football. The ones that don’t will let the kids play. And most kids – parents pulling them or not – will likely not want to stop playing.

So if what you have is the participants as well as their parents resistant to making the change, how simple would it be to actually make such a change? Realistically, how would we be capable of making such a change? Where would we even start? It’s not as simple as banning the playing of the sport. Not in any realistic sense…not in this world. It’d be nice to say “You just ban it.” But that won’t happen. To institute real change, you’ve got to be realistic about how you want it done.

I don’t know. I don’t have answers for how to go about doing it. But I think that may be more a function of not caring enough to attempt to initiate that change myself. As a father of two daughters, if I had a child that wanted to play the sport, I’d start reading like crazy on the subject, and make the decision whether or not to allow my kid to play, very similar to the way my parents decided not to allow me to play.

I guess that actually means my answer lies in educating the parents so that they can make the most informed decision for their kids. It’s not a perfect solution, and it’s not the best solution.

But it’s at least a start.

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