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There's a theory bouncing around the internet that the NFL is entering a quiet crisis of talent. That youth talent pipelines are in decline for a variety of reasons, including CTE fears and a general emasculation of American youth along with pay-to-play camps and lower level coaches variously accused of being too obsessed with winning at all costs and ignoring player development, or alternatively too obsessed with player the "right" way and failing to teach proper winning football.
Evidence offered is the decline of great QB play in the modern NFL. You have ancient QBs, some of them mediocre to begin with, being called in and showing a certain intelligence and ability to run an offense that modern quarterbacks lack. Phil Rivers came off the couch and started games, Case Keenum was able to just shred my Philadelphia Eagles. The ability to process and run an offense seems like a lost art.
People argue that the youth participation rate is drying up, that the most talented athletes no longer go into football in the same way they used to, that college players are choosing to stay in college for Van Wilder years and then retire with their money rather than enter the NFL, and that as a result professional football will inevitably decline.
I don't actually know enough about football to make a judgement about the evidence offered, my question is about prior historical examples.
What other sports have followed a similar pattern in this or other countries: popular sport, declines in talent as a result of youth participation drying up with the quality of players and play declining to the point where the old are simply better than the young for too long, and an ultimate slide towards irrelevance? I can imagine examples, but none I know enough about to be sure.
College football is crowding out NFL fandom in every social circle I participate in. MMA and boxing are still reasonably popular among coworkers(with a very sharp income gradient; thé more money you make, thé more you like boxing- and like most trades workplaces, there’s a large pay difference between entry level guys and experienced ones). Hardcore sports fans around me are getting into MLS, keeping college ball, and dropping basketball entirely(this may vary by region). Texas A&M is the new cowboys as the default fandom.
Don’t get me wrong; I see evidence of cowboys fandom everywhere I go, as a generic corporate thing. But more ‘fandom’ tends to be for college sports.
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The closest parallel I can think of would be boxing. It was by far the most popular and profitable sport in America in the 19th Century, and really only fell behind baseball following World War II. I feel like it was still a pretty big deal well into the 90s. But there has only been two fights in the past 20 years that have broken through to the mainstream: the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight in 2015 and that novelty fight between Tyson and one of the Paul brothers. The rise of other sports, combined with boxing's violence and reputation for corruption, gradually thinned out the talent, and then MMA put the final nail in the coffin when boxers' lack of grappling skills had them all getting wrecked. They had lost youth sports and most of the normies to football and basketball decades ago, and now the dedicated martial artists had somewhere more "authentic" and "practical" to go.
It's possible the NFL falls much faster and harder than boxing, because you can't rely on a handful of 2-person PPV events to pay the bills. You need 60 guys per team once a week for 16 weeks every year. It requires a much, much wider talent pipeline to remain viable. It's possible they are able to introduce enough new equipment and rule tweaks to solve the CTE issue, but the clock is running out. I don't know a single parent willing to let their son play tackle football. It's only a matter of time before non-southern high schools start shuttering their programs.
I doubt football will die out completely, but a dangerous niche sport the vast majority of the population has no direct experience with is going to have a ceiling to Its popularity. Especially with a sport as complex as football. Boxing is super boring to watch because I don't know enough about the sport to be able to tell who's winning most of the time. A couple generations of only a small minority of super dedicated football families participating in youth football, and there won't be enough of a ln audience to keep the NFL as we know it today solvent. We're already at the point where the majority of guests at any given super bowl party has no interest whatsoever in the game itself.
The rise of sports gambling and daily fantasy may be a lifeline, but I can also see a pretty mighty backlash building, so a lot could easily come crashing down if league stakeholders all over-invested in an industry that ends up getting burnt to the ground by regulators.
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