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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.
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.
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