Does Football have a future?

Once upon a time, our national pastime had nine innings, a long season, a pastoral setting and the worship and appreciation of the Boys of Summer.

Today, that pastime has been replaced by 60 minutes of intense violence. With words like blitz and gridiron. Where once stadiums had an ambulance standing by for fans that might have a medical emergency, today, the ambulance is there for the players whose concussions and broken bones and worse, are the norm. What’s worse, is that is also a game that children want to play.

I guess we shouldn't’ be surprised that a culture that reveres “Bullets and Burgers” would turn to football as its new national pastime. Put more succinctly, is football driving the decay of our culture, or has our culture provided the perfect storm for the explosion of football's success?

Former sports journalist Steve Almond, in Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto, takes a look at the decay and corruption that is football today. A sport perhaps more in need of a warden than a commissioner.

My conversation with Steve Almond:

League of Denial

We worry about too big to fail. Yet bank losses pale in comparison to the degree to which the National Football League, has been too big to tell the truth. Its denials have seemingly directly resulted in the death of NFL players. Even worse, it has created untold dangers to young kids playing football, because their parents believed the leagues denials about the risk of brain injury coming from concussion and repetitive head trauma. When seen in its totality, it’s hard to deny that this ten billion dollar Park Avenue business, that is the NFL, does not have blood on its hands.

We’ve all heard the debate questioning the impacts of repeated concussions and head trauma on NFL players. But the facts are are not up for debate. This is not a case where the cover up is worse than the crime. For the NFL, the cover up is the crime.

Two of our top investigative journalists, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru look inside twenty years of denial on the part of the NFL, in their book and Frontline documentary League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth.

My conversation with Mark Fainaru-Wada & Steve Fainaru: