"Heads get in the way"

John Kass writes at the Chicago Tribune,

To witness the death of the multi-billion dollar National Football League, you really don't need to see sportswriters wringing their hands over the moral dilemma of covering America's Roman circus of brain trauma.

And you don't need to watch multi-millionaire football stars, pampered for most of their lives, ostentatiously disrespecting the American national anthem, kneeling, their raised fists in the air.

You don't need to see the desperation in the NFL's television commercials: actresses in team gear, holding snack trays to feed their (virtual) extended team-gear-wearing families, as the NFL begs middle-class women to mother their game before it dies.

You don't have to do any of that to see how football is dying.

All you have to do is go out to a youth football field, as I did on Sunday morning, and talk to parents and coaches.

...what makes football different from the others is the design of the game — sending bodies crashing in high speed, high impact collisions. It is what makes it awesome and dangerous and fun to play.

Heads get in the way. And football provides not only concussions, but by design, multiple hits to the head. There is no getting around this.

Read more here.