Why football persists

“American football — by its design and the way it is played — poses a high risk of injury to young people,” Professor Stephen Gambescia of Drexel University argued in the August 11 Philadelphia Inquirer. “We should question why we expend so much time, money, and energy on an enterprise that invariably sacrifices so many young minds, bodies, and sometime spirits.”

Actuaries for the National Football League have estimated that one-third of former pro players may eventually suffer brain damage. Though high school players are less likely to suffer brain damage, some schools ended their seasons early last year because so many players had been injured.

“The sport is inherently, fundamentally violent,” writes John Gerdy, author of Ball or Bands: Football vs. Music as an Educational and Community Investment. “It is what it is, a brutal game.” Gerdy advocates replacing tackle football with “flag” football, in which the defender merely snatches a ribbon attached to the ball carrier’s belt and nobody ever gets tackled. (Click here.)

Brain surgery

As a former player who cherished the experience, I’m always troubled by this debate. On the one hand, organized football seduced me as early as seventh grade with its unmatched combination of physical and mental challenge. The notion of choreographing all those X’s and O’s on paper, and then testing those plans on a field against a savagely human defense, fascinated me then and still does. With the passage of time I’ve also come to perceive the critical role football played in my education: As I’ve said here before, many of my most valuable life and career lessons — how to handle adversity, how to push myself beyond my presumed limits, how to give and take criticism — came not in a classroom but on the field.

On the other hand, the mounting evidence of the effects of concussions and other serious football-related injuries in recent years is downright frightening (even if, according to some studies, the absolute number of concussions remains unchanged). A cousin who played middle linebacker for Drexel University in the ‘50s now barely recognizes his closest relatives. A few years ago one of my Penn teammates from the ’60s lost the ability to walk, so that he had to be carried to his seat when he attended games; he regained his mobility only after brain surgery. These neurological problems may well have been football-related.

So should I encourage my grandsons (now 11 and 5) to play football? I’m on the fence. But perhaps that’s the wrong question. Instead of arguing football pro or con, we might more usefully ask why such a violent sport persists, and what might replace it if it vanished.

Armchair warriors

To its critics, football is a lucrative spectator sport, staged to provide an outlet for bloodthirsty but sedentary Americans, who cheer bone-crunching hits much the way Romans used to applaud when lions gobbled up Christians. These armies of armchair warriors may indeed explain the popularity of professional and big-time collegiate football. But what explains football’s broad popularity among amateur participants?

A few years ago the New York Times reported that many former women’s colleges, having gone co-ed, had discovered that a varsity football program was an ingenious way to attract male students, many of whom would happily pay $25,000 or more in tuition for the opportunity to play college football. Even in lands where soccer is king, like France, American-style football leagues are cropping up lately. The 2014 documentary film Touchdown Israel, screened last spring at Philadelphia’s Jewish Film Festival, revealed that hundreds of Israelis — Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike — are voluntarily spending $800 each for equipment and devoting two or three nights a week to practice on improvised soccer fields for the privilege of playing in organized American-style football leagues. Presumably, football gives them some reward that they don’t get from soccer.

Jousting and dueling

We must also wonder why football is embraced by such a diverse range of serious educational institutions that have little else in common — from the Groton School (whose Episcopalian founder Endicott Peabody made football the centerpiece of his “muscular” brand of Christianity), to a Quaker college like Earlham, to intellectual hothouses like the University of Chicago (which revived varsity football in 1969 after a 30-year absence) and M.I.T. (where players tell each other that the game on Saturday is the easiest part of their week), to my own Fieldston School in New York (operated by the Society For Ethical Culture, for goodness’ sake!).

What explains this broad appeal of a sport that so many people find unappealing? I would chalk it up to two factors: (1) the innately aggressive nature of most male humans, and (2) the fact that football is actually less violent and more intellectually stimulating than the alternative outlets dreamed up so far, like boxing, dueling, jousting, bullfighting, auto racing, skydiving, riots, rumbles, gladiator combat, and, of course, war.

John Wayne’s theory

Jeremiah Ford, Penn’s athletic director in my student days, had a ready retort whenever anyone suggested that Penn should give up football, and it had nothing to do with teaching teamwork or building character. "If colleges eliminated football,” he reasoned, “the students would organize their own teams." That, in fact, is precisely how American college football began in the 1870s — as a relatively benign alternative to “organized riot” on campuses of elite East Coast colleges. And it’s precisely what’s happening in places like France and Israel today.

We all know, as John Wayne reminded us, that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. But given the natural male propensity for violence, the critical question about football is not whether it’s objectively good or bad. It’s “Compared to what?”