I love football. Out of all of the sports I watch it is my favorite. I also played football in high school. I can say without a single doubt that my kids will not play football. I played before all of the concussion awareness and concussion protocol. We called them "dings" and no big deal. A source of pride was "playing dinged up" and viewed as a badge of honor. Looking back there was a very noticeable decline in my cognitive ability which was reflected in my school work during football season.

I also think that the NFL won't exist in 20 years. At least the sport we know as american football today. If it survives it will be a starkly different game than what we know it know. I just don't see how it can survive in it's current state given all of the information and research we have. I recently listened to Arian Foster's interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. He provides some insights on the health of pro football players. He said nearly every player gets some form of surgery after the season. He also said that playing through injuries on pain killers happens every game and it's impossible to go through a football career without surgeries or injuries. The head trauma is just something we recently found out about. The fact that out of all of the brains of football players they studied nearly all of them have signs of CTE is a very shocking statistic. An almost 100% correlation between an action (playing football) and a disease (CTE). It is similar to the tobacco giants when the link between cancer and tobacco use was discovered. You can't really have a reliable product that increases sales every year and continues to grow when it kills those who are involved or consume the product. Something has to give here.