Falling Football Participation In America - NYT article 11/08/2019
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/08/sports/falling-football-participation-in-america.html
This doesn't call out Michigan in particular but... it's happening.
Another fun post to compliment the Slate one just posted.
Bye week fodder. Happy impending wife day.
Chart below - there's good infographics here if you click through. I'll save my takes for the comments... if any. Going to read the Slate post now. Joy.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:02 AM ^
Sad.?
November 8th, 2019 at 3:36 PM ^
Quick... NYT where is the article on the decline in women's basketball participation?
November 8th, 2019 at 11:03 AM ^
In before the rehashing of "dangerous game" vs "lots of benefits as long as parents and kids make informed choices" argument.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:05 AM ^
And getting worse. My kids school had to merge with another middle school just to field a team this year, and they only had 14 players. Three years ago the team had 23 players just in their school alone. Lacrosse and soccer are taking over.....
November 8th, 2019 at 11:16 AM ^
Lacrosse is a very bad version of hockey. Just not a great sport. Not even close.
Soccer...has its own CTE head injury problems. Not as bad as football, but sorry those headers are not good for the brain.
Kids should gravitate back to baseball and into track/cross country.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:22 AM ^
I hear that the Chess Club is having a resurgence, but watch for those carpal tunnel injuries.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:29 AM ^
Problem with baseball is most don't find it as entertaining on tv as other sports. And there is a thing in baseball that is the same as football, if you don't have certain physical measurables you do not get looked at by college scouts. Friend that is a baseball coach says every year he can't get kids looked at that are far better players than others he has getting scholarships and it's all measurables. He has kids quitting baseball for other Soccer and Lacrosse as well.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:11 PM ^
Sure those are valid issues with baseball.
But don't most team sports have the 'right measurables' issue? I mean B-Ball and football are far worse on that metric. There is even a good deal of 'taller is better' going on in soccer.
Also, Baseball is more challenging to consume (for the person who is not already a serious fan) on TV than basketball or football. In the stadium, however, this is not at all the case. If anything, baseball is arguably a great in-stadium experience.
Anyway, on the whole baseball does not have much of a 'life altering' injury problem. And for the most part, despite some preference for certain measurables (up to a point), one need not be an extreme outlier body type to become elite in baseball.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:29 PM ^
Mandatory. Maybe those kids who don't have the measurables need better looking girlfriends.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:14 PM ^
Track and XC are the worst play team sports while you can.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:19 PM ^
"Why punctuation matters."
November 8th, 2019 at 12:29 PM ^
The local high school when I lived in Texas had 1200 kids in the middle school football program. 300 made the freshman team. 200 made the JV team. And 150 made varsity.
November 8th, 2019 at 4:08 PM ^
Not sure why this is being negged. It is probably just the truth. Football is and has been almost unfathomably huge if Texas.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:09 AM ^
You can see it in Michigan, just by the number of Division 6 to 8 high school teams who used to field full 11 man teams that are now playing 8 man football. Suttons Bay, a former Division 6 team, had to move to 8 man football.
The fear of head/other injuries, and the rise of sports like soccer and lacrosse, have certainly detrimentally impacted the levels of youth participation in football.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:25 AM ^
The head injuries have had a big deal, but I think it's more opportunity to play Soccer or Lacrosse. In football there weren't a lot of opportunities for many and those kids found them in the other sports. Add that to the video game culture for young teens and football is going away.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:23 PM ^
It's happening all down the chain too ... my son plays freshman CYO full-contact football (8 to 10 year olds).
The team has had to combine five local schools into one team to get enough kids to keep playing.
November 8th, 2019 at 1:48 PM ^
In the UP, most teams now moving to 8 man football are small towns with a crappy economy and declining enrollments. They don't even field a soccer or lacrosse team. Just the nature of the beast living in small town Michigan.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:10 AM ^
A high school football team didn’t just represent the school, it represented the town. No other sport will do that.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:31 AM ^
Eh, it happens in basketball quite a bit. Heck, certain communities specialize in different sports.Certain communities are wrestling, swimming, soccer etc focused.
November 8th, 2019 at 1:46 PM ^
Calumet, Houghton & Marquette would like to talk to you about their Hockey programs. Football.....well, that is just another sport to them.
November 8th, 2019 at 1:56 PM ^
In the UP (and probably Minnesota) it's hockey, not football. All depends on the most popular sport where you live.
November 8th, 2019 at 2:28 PM ^
I’m from the UP and those schools won’t have close to the attendance at a hockey game than what football does. No comparison. High school hockey meh
November 8th, 2019 at 2:50 PM ^
That's apples and oranges though. Football games are a rare occurrence and take place in the fall when the weather is often still nice. Hockey games are in the dead of winter, played indoors, and there are a lot more of them.
Is Duke a football school? Its football attendance is much higher than its basketball attendance.
November 8th, 2019 at 2:31 PM ^
I know this wasn't the intent of your comment but the idea of a team's character being reliant on the performance of a bunch of teenagers playing a sport is a little depressing.
Again, I get that people take pride in their children and the schools, but some of the deeper issues we've seen with HS athletics recently stem from this general deification of kids while they have the uniform on.
November 8th, 2019 at 2:35 PM ^
I just know thousands of people show up to a high school football game in a small town in the UP. People show up that have no relatives playing in the game. Maybe where you grew up it’s different.
November 8th, 2019 at 2:43 PM ^
Also specifically for the UP many schools are seeing a decline in enrollment so that also hurts fielding 3 football teams.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:21 AM ^
Apologies to Zach Slagle's family... I can't seem to get back into the post to edit that tag.
There's been quite a bit of data collection, rule changes, and updates to methodology since the season where Brady Hoke sent Shane back in while concussed and Kosta Karageorge committed suicide prior to The Game. That was a pivot point for Michigan, in my opinion. Michigan has changed considerably since then. You can't take the violence out of this game. If only we had a medical doctor to lead us through this. Schlissel has been less than inspiring on this point. He's a got a hard row to hoe granted.
Slagle's suicide was discussed previously - but CTE is the elephant in the room. Money is not suffering. It's still a problem. More change is needed.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:28 AM ^
The country population has increased by nearly the same percentage as that percentage drop
November 8th, 2019 at 11:43 AM ^
I had a conversation yesterday with a former UM player from the Schembechler era. He believes that football as we know it won't exist two decades from now, primarily because of CTE issues and fears.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:56 AM ^
I believe that.
This is just starting to turn into another Blue State vs. Red State issue, too. Easy to imagine how that will go ....
November 8th, 2019 at 3:37 PM ^
The map of states where football is unusually important really doesn't red/blue much. The southeast is huge, but that includes purple Florida. Parts of California are huge. The plains aren't, and the northeast is tiny, except New Jersey for some reason (and without a true major school, it's a great recruiting ground). The Rust Belt is somewhere in the middle.
What scares me is that it might become an income issue. And poor urban and rural kids need to be protected just as much as anyone else. We have to find a way to run the sport without people getting hit in the head. So far, that's proving impossible and our beginning attempts are already altering games.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:17 PM ^
Flag football, or some version, will take its place. Princeton just formed a flag football team. We followed their lead once...
November 8th, 2019 at 3:59 PM ^
How many people will actually watch that though? I know I wouldn't. The day that happens is the day that college and pro football die, at least at the popularity level they are now. I think we are for making the game as safe as possible within reason but if you lose any physical element of football at all, it is just not a very exciting sport at that point.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:46 AM ^
I think the game will carry on for the foreseeable future, with some changes, but the people playing it will on average be darker and poorer.
November 8th, 2019 at 2:41 PM ^
I honestly don't remember who wrote it so my apologies, but I read an article some years about the history of boxing and the author noted that it was a sport that largely appealed to those on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. It's why there used to be a ton of recent immigrants like Italians, Irish, etc. who were great boxers, then that dropped as economic opportunities improved and being punched in the head for a living wasn't as appealing. Then we had an uptick in great black boxers and the other sports trailed in integration, but now there are fewer great black boxers because there are other economic opportunities. Now there are a lot more Latinx boxers and those from certain Eastern European countries, and my guess is that the pattern will likely continue unless the sport simply gets legislated into oblivion because watching people kill themselves isn't as appealing.
Football obviously isn't to the same degree, but I think the poverty thing (less so than the color of his/her skin) will be the deciding factor for a lot of kids. In my circles, with parents who mostly have college degrees (many also have advanced degrees) plus decent incomes, boys of all racial backgrounds are looking at other sports besides football.
November 8th, 2019 at 3:02 PM ^
I think I may have read the same (or similar) article. It's always the people on the bottom of the economic that do the dirty work.
Also, Latinx is out now. Turns out native Spanish speakers and other folks from Latin American countries didn't appreciate white, native English speaking, college professors making up a word to describe them. It was in the Times the other day.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:47 AM ^
Two-hand touch RULES!
November 8th, 2019 at 11:47 AM ^
I know the school age population has been dropping. We can't understand the extent of the football participation problem without knowing the participation rate. I did a quick search but only found school age population numbers from 1970 to 2009. That showed a very steep drop in school age population. If the overall school age population drop is taken into account the football participation rate drop from 2009 to 2019 might not indicate as big a problem as it initially appears.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:58 AM ^
This is a good point. People are having way fewer kids and they're having them much later in life. As someone with kids over a decade apart in ages, the decisions I'm making the 2nd time around are very different than the first time.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:01 PM ^
this was exactly my thought, minus the diligence to actually search the interweb for population numbers. i think people have been having less kids and though our country's population might be going up, our kid ratio is not and in fact we are on the brink (as europe already is) of not having enough children to maintain our population.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:24 PM ^
I'm pretty sure we're already there. We dropped below replacement rate around the time of the financial crash and birth rates haven't recovered.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:24 PM ^
The US has had sub-replacement fertility for about a decade now. However, immigration is a significant net positive and ensures that the population will continue to grow.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:25 PM ^
With 80% of families one emergency or health crisis away from poverty, it makes complete and total sense. I'm a 30 year old home owner. My partner and I are social workers. But to maintain the type of lifestyle we want (owning a home, dog, two cars, one decent vacation a year), kids just don't fit into it. I don't get health insurance for my work and just take the risk of not paying $250 a month for a "health care plan" (if you can even call them that). I don't think it's a real mystery why many are choosing not to have kids.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:17 PM ^
Actually, overall school age enrollment has increased 3% between 1990 and 2014, with a further increase of 3% expected thru 2020 (source).
Individual state data are very interesting. Michigan suffered a 6.7% decline in school age population between 1990 and 2014, and is expected to see a massive 10.4% decline in school age enrollment from 2014 thru 2026. During the study football participation in MI dropped 14%, but half of that is explained by student population decline.
Consider the experience in a couple of other states:
(student pop growth 1990-2014 | 2014-2026 | football participation 2009-2018)
Michigan: -6.7% | -10.4% | -14%
Ohio: -2.2% | -5.7% | -27%
Texas: +7.9% | +13.7% | -10%
Florida: +4.6% | +12.6%| -5%
The decline is real, and the anecdotes are becoming a trend.
November 8th, 2019 at 11:54 AM ^
This struck me as damning.
(The National Football Foundation’s) mission was straightforward: to promote football as a way to mold future leaders through sportsmanship, competition and academic excellence.
Sportsmanship doesn’t exist anymore in college (everybody cheats), academic excellence is a facade, and the only thing current leaders are teaching is a win at all costs mentality. Hardly the molding that resonates with the average American. Maybe the problem is more fundamental. Maybe the things that made the sport so appealing post WWII have been turned into nothing more than lip service, and the product itself merely entertainment without a connection to things Americans really valued and made the sport so popular for so many.
November 8th, 2019 at 2:59 PM ^
How long have you been watching college football? Cheating was much worse in the 70s and 80s than now.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:00 PM ^
As something of a fence-sitter in this conversation, with deep reservations about football but still watching addictively, I think it's important--still--to note: if that 90 percent are more invested than ever then. . . football is hardly dying.
I scream for Michigan football, exult many times in the big hits. But if I had a son, I would not let him play football. When it's your own flesh and blood you just feel like that would be irresponsible. And on this subject, like a lot of parents, I don't give a crap what other people think.
I don't worry about whether the game survives; I do worry about it surviving in some form that I still find appealing. Yeah, paying the kids is inevitable, but will I still LIKE THE GAME when it's twenty football factories with 'roided kids knocking one another's brains out? To some that could seem like an exaggerated projection. . . but I don't like the NFL at all. I like football principally because it's connected to my school, carries all this tradition. . .
November 8th, 2019 at 12:24 PM ^
NFL product, in terms of concussions, has actually gotten much safer... because they utilize data and machine learning and are doing some innovative things. They banned the crack-back downfield block on punts, for example, because they saw that in 2017-18, like 50% of concussions happened on those plays.
The bottom line is that it is a much safer game, top to bottom. Now, of course safer doesn't equal "safe" and "risk free" and I agree -- much more will need to change. I think potentially keeping the safety closer to line of scrimmage could help. Less of a run-way to gather speed and make huge hits.
Football needs to grow a bit closer to its fore-father: Rugby. Rugby isn't going anywhere... in fact, Major League rugby is EXPANDING in the USA and is growing popular. Rugby is a great game to watch and football really can become safer by emulating its fore-father game.
November 8th, 2019 at 12:48 PM ^
Rugby has its own concussion issues, though.