Comments on: Two Futures for Football http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/01/30/two-futures-for-football/ Responses to Media and Culture Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:35:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 By: Christopher Cwynar http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/01/30/two-futures-for-football/comment-page-1/#comment-392362 Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:38:42 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=17533#comment-392362 Thank you for this thoughtful post. I agree with most of what you suggest about the potential futures for football. To my mind, it will be the combination of the two scenarios you envision that will lead to diminished interest in professional football. Rule changes designed to protect the players will provoke the ire of dedicated, traditionalist fans while less committed onlookers will turn away as we learn more about brain injuries in football. I already see evidence of the former in the discourses that circulate among the players and the comment threads on sites like Profootballtalk.com (along with much distaste for the ever-increasing cost of attending games). As you note, the latter seems likely to unfold gradually as more and more parents place their children in other activities and the public loses its taste for a violent spectacle that has increasingly unavoidable and permanent effects on its participants. As participation diminishes, so might the investment in football as the basis for so many rituals here in the US. Of course, having said that, I am continually astonished by the extent to which public life here in Wisconsin revolves around the Badgers and the Packers during football season. That doesn’t seem likely to be change any time soon.

There is also a third possibility I see. That is a much colder scenario wherein we continue to learn about head injuries and make changes to the game at lower levels, but the NFL pushes on with only limited modifications to its product. In this era in which neoliberal discourses of personal freedom and responsibility have so much purchase and the concept of the public seems to less and less central, I can envision a scenario in which people simply conclude that the players are well compensated and knew the risks and so these terrible outcomes are not such a problem. At least, not a problem to be addressed as a broader social collective, many of whose members derive great pleasure from the spectacle. This seems to me to be the least likely scenario, but I do see these discourses swirling around in the arenas of public debate where these issues are raised.

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