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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2722 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

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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.

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.

Football is not a “dangerous niche sport”. Whatever metric you use (except personally playing) it’s going to be 1 or 2 and in most cases that’s against the other sport called football. Quick google it’s second in professional revenue (this doesn’t count college which you probably should). I’d be shocked if football wasn’t number 1 in gambling.

It does seem at younger levels its popularity is shrinking which I think is a bad thing because the average young male does need an outlet for controlled violence.

More professional Chess players have died during games than the totality of players in NFL games have.

Becase the average NFL player plays only 17 games a year, while a professional chess player might play that number in a single day?

At the highest levels, not quite as many as you would think. But the world record for the most amount of people at one time whilst blindfolded is something like 50. That’s just insane to me. Even Magnus Carlsen at his height was something like 12-13 at once. The best I ever did completely in my head was 2 when I played competitively.

I was thinking more of how they seem to play a lot of blitz and rapid games these days. Those don't take very long to grind out a ton of games. Plus they just spend a lot of time playing, of course.

This sounds like the results of an Aella survey

How many hoes could you take, whilst blindfolded?

I think it’s going to fall, though to be honest I think baseball is falling faster. I live in a baseball town, and yes you’ll see team gear, but nobody really gets into the ins and outs of the game, and don’t follow the game or the players to any real degree. Most of the players are Hispanic imports from abroad, and really, the games up until the all-star break don’t matter much. And unless you’re super into pitching, Theres not nearly enough action to keep people interested in the game, to the point where the league itself feels the need to artificially speed up the game with pinch hitters, pitch clocks, and base runners in extra innings. If you need to speed up the game to make it watchable, it’s not going to last.

I like football, but I think the game has too many stops. It’s hard to keep watching when 1/2 or more of the “play” time is standing around waiting to actually play the one play before standing around waiting for the next play. Add in that with rare exceptions, most plays outside the red zone don’t matter much, and you get a game that is 99% fluff. You end up doing other things while waiting for the good parts of the game. And I don’t see that as being a sustainable model for a popular sport.

Most pro sports also have a big problem in the price of attending an actual game. It costs hundreds to attend a game in the NFL. It’s somewhat better for baseball. And figuring out which of the streaming services actually show your team often means subscriptions to multiple services and dealing with blackout games. It makes introducing the game to kids harder. And if you don’t make it easy for kids to get into the game, then eventually they find other things to watch and do and get into.

A few years back, the Wall Street Journal did an oft-quoted analysis that found that in a 1-hour football game (that takes up 3 hours of broadcast time on average), there was only 11 minutes of action. People who don't like football took this as proof that the game was stupid, but 11 minutes is actually the perfect amount of time, and it explains why football is so popular. It's counterintuitive, but it's true. Sure, hockey has continual action, but unless you're at the game, this actually works to its detriment. Too much excitement is no excitement. A football game is broken up into chunks whose meaning is clearly evident to anyone with a working understanding of the game, and there's plenty of time in between to both contemplate what we've just seen and anticipate what is going to happen next. Commentators have more room to show replays and offer in-depth analysis. If you're watching with friends you can have a conversation, pause during the play, then continue your conversation. Constant action is like watching a Western film that's nothing but shootouts. Yes, the shootout might be the most exciting part of a normal western, but it has an ebb and flow that makes the shootout meaningful. I love hockey, don't get me wrong, but I understand why it's not as popular as football. If you watch a football game at a bar, you'll get a dozen opinions on what Team A just did and what they should do on the next play. Most of these people don't know what they're talking about, but there's enough meat on the bone for them to at least have an opinion. In hockey, strategy is completely lost on the casual viewer. There isn't enough time in between plays for the announcers to explain it, and the action is so fast that unless you've been involved in the sport for years you won't be able to spot it. the best you get is people yelling for them to shoot more on the power play.

Analytics I think has ruined the in-game baseball experience now. The movement to 3-outcome players (walk, strike-out, home run) means that when you watch the game in the stadium you can’t see most of the action.

The pitcher-batter battle I think has greatly improved but you only see that watching on tv.

The costs of attendance seems to be a function of a K-Shaped economy. You can find cheap tickets to watch second tier games.

Can you elaborate on how the meat of the action is only available on TV?

You can’t see pitch movement in the stands to see the crazy things pitchers are doing with the ball or how they are changing location pitch by pitch on the batter. Speed differences do pop up on the score board. That entire pitcher/batter game you can’t pick up on.

And I guess the difference vs the past is that fielding, by far the most exciting part of baseball, has gone away because of the 3-outcome hitters you note. Boo.

...you get a game that is 99% fluff. You end up doing other things while waiting for the good parts of the game. And I don’t see that as being a sustainable model for a popular sport.

Point me to the popular sport where I can't make this complaint. I mean, the answer is hockey, which is the least popular of the major pro sports leagues and faces constant ratings decline. A game that is 99% fluff appears to be the only sustainable model for a sports league.

Baseball games take a long time between pitches and even longer between balls in play. Football games are short bursts of action between huddles and commercial breaks. Soccer is just endless dribbling and back passing and writhing around on the ground. Basketball seems like it features a lot of action and points scoring, but outside of the playoffs they mostly just go through the motions until the 4th quarter, and so many points are scored that every individual scoring play isn't that exciting. NASCAR races are mostly just watching left turns, long periods of time can pass with nothing really happening. Combat sports are probably the most variable of any sport, but you can't watch a full UFC card and not catch some really real lay'n'pray snoozefests.

The reality is simple: "boring" sports are just a matter of personal perception. If you don't understand or don't care about the game, then it's boring to watch; if you understand the game on a deep level and care about it, then it's interesting.

All sports are a matter of perception. There was a big debate among people a number of years ago as to whether or not “e-Sports” would ever become a thing in America and take after their peers in Asia who’d already developed a system for it. Since then it’s slowly bled into acceptance in niche areas in the west overtime, but still not enough to get mainstream coverage on ESPN or some large news platform. A loose acquaintance of mine I used to play team matches with in SC2 (and very loosely knew back on Battle.net on SC1) was a guy by the handle of “DreXxiN”. A few years ago I typed his name into Google and it directed me to some website that I think was called eSports Heaven or something like that. From the looks of it he tried an upstart to occupy a place in eSports news coverage. No idea how it’s working out for him and haven’t hit him up in a number of years, but that kind of thing is there.

Baseball never had any real appeal to me. Skateboarding back in the days of the X-Games I was addicted to; and I used to skate when I was a teenager, along with a younger cousin of mine. I was never terribly good at it but we still loved it (and of course were consequently addicted to the Tony Hawk PlayStation games). Professional bowling I loved to watch when I was younger but finding it was always a pain in the ass. Football? Meh. I’ll catch it in the playoffs, or when the Raiders or playing; or when the 49ers are losing. Basketball I love. Chess I follow to a decent degree, as I used to play it competitively. I suppose it really is a matter of perception.

Hockey, soccer, basketball and rugby are at least played fairly continuously, without timeouts between plays and numerous play reviews and flags on top of timeouts and TV breaks. I like tge game, but if you’re not used to turn-based play where you get time to set everything up 4 times and run the play to see what happens, it’s kinda boring and I think it makes the games longer than they need to be.

Boxing seems much more driven specifically by the US having no good heavyweights during that time. If there was an American even at the level of an Anthony Joshua it would probably be way bigger

Oh man, my best friend and I used to have shouting matches about who was the best; we were huge into boxing. When we weren’t shooting each other with frozen paintballs in the backyard, we’d box and fight on this enormous trampoline his parents had in the backyard and we’d get really into it. Got bruises and bloody noses occasionally, but it was a lot of fun.

The early days of UFC and MMA my sibling and I always caught; back when weight divisions weren’t there and it followed more of a progressive tournament style format, as one single continuous event, and the Gracie’s still held sway over much of the world. When that went, UFC lost my interest all but entirely. I’m still big into boxing though.

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

RETVRN to Rugby!

Rugby is no better than foodball in the CTE department. Sure, it's a yellow (or red) to initiate contact with the head, but there are plenty of head injuries that occur through the physical nature of the game by no fault of the players. You can't watch a game without (at least) a player getting sent off for an HIA.

Huh, TIL. I wonder why there hasn't been such a backlash in the Rugby-playing countries as there has been against American Football.

There has. It was a big deal in the British news when a former rugby player (Rob Burrows) died of MND which was probably caused by head injuries. But rugby isn’t as widely followed in Britain as football is in the US, the English invented too many sports for any other than soccer to have the outsized prominence of (American) football in US society.

Having played both at a reasonably-high level I think NFL's considerably worse (atleast as a lineman). Biggest hits I ever took were getting pull blocked as a defensive lineman, and it's just a constant onslaught of ramming your head into eachother.

Yeah, I'd agree that linemen are certainly getting the short end of the stick. The only mitigation is that they only start a foot apart so they're not slamming into each other at full speed. For everyone else it's probably comparable. But both rugby and football are on another level compared to light-contact sports like soccer.

A lineman generates a lot of force inside that foot, and do it again and again and again and again. I'd be shocked if the vast majority of head trauma in the NFL didn't take place during blocking as opposed to tackles, if only since the average play will have what 2 or 3 players involved in 'tackling/being tackled' and like 15 players blocking/being blocked.

Boxing was the big one I thought of, but I'm not versed enough in the lore of pugilism to say when we started seeing signs that we could universalize. Did we see older champions hanging on longer as the talent pool shrank? Did we see fewer young up-and-comers? Did we see a decline in skill and strategy over time?

Thoroughlygruntled mentioned the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight. I actually bought the PPV for that one and had people over for it.

Holy shit, what a boring disappointment.

I've never been into boxing. I used to watch UFC, in a "get drunk with the boys on Friday night" kind of way. They were fun. They were exciting. There was passion. I remember one, can't remember the fighters, but it was two big strikers slugging it out, literally clapping for each other after getting rocked in the face. Just sheer love of the game. The worst of those fights was more exciting than watching Mayweather's extremely technical, pointsmaxxing "I take a Full Defense" every single round.

Based on that limited sample size, I think the problem may be more of an increase in skill and strategy, at the cost of heart and valor.

We watched the fight on a crackstream and were also very let down by it. I wanted Pacquiao to beat the shit out of him because I detest the way Mayweather fights. I saw only one person fighting the whole time and the other half of the match was Floyd dancing for point technicalities.

Tedious, boring, conservative fighters have been around forever though. Especially at the lower weight classes where there's just less of a chance to find the KO, and the smaller-weights used to be a lot smaller back in the day since weight cutting was nowhere near what it is now.

Good questions. My previous comment covers more or less the extent of my boxing history knowledge. I have a vague impression that this happened (it's telling that Mike Tyson is still the most famous boxer in the world, more than 30 years past his prime), but don't have any real evidence to back it up. Vibes only.

I mean George Foreman hung around forever. Boxing decline is more of an American boxing issue (especially at the largest sizes) but I'd personally argue the rise of Basketball probably did more for that via hoovering up so much athletic black talent.

Also modern elite HW are gigantic compared to legacy talent due to a mix of the global pool and advances in talent sourcing. I believe Anthony Joshua absolutely clears any boxing HW before 2000 in general athleticism. Muhammad Ali and his opponents were largely kinda small by modern standards

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