Why America is falling out of love with football

I have my reasons for not watching anymore.

To add to your “interruption of play,” I used to be able to read half a book and get my floors done and never miss a down during an average Sunday game. Since I don’t turn on the TV much anymore, and never on a Sunday, my floors are always dirty.

“Girls soccer”

I believe it. Local sports talk (Pittsburgh) had every concussion expert they could find (including all the top NFL ones) about 3 or 4 years ago.

One said that worse concussions occur in ice hockey (hard surfaces) and his number one dangerous sport was CHEERLEADING. Girls aren’t made to take hard knocks.

My Dad had season tickets from 1968 till 1995 when I graduated high school. I went to every home game from age 5 to age 18, except for 5 or so.

The change for me happened when my older sister went to UNL. She was a team ambassador, and knew a lot of the players (including a fine gentleman who now announces at ESPN). That guy used to ride around in a Geo Metro with others on the team. Seeing them get out of that thing always made me laugh.

Some of the players were functionally illiterate. I mean they couldn’t read their own name. Some were criminals, only kept out of jail to run or block. Some were great guys, but few were actually in college to do anything but play ball.

As I got older and went into school myself, I found that there were fewer and fewer players that I could respect. I went to Iowa State on an engineering scholarship, and was in class with some players who had no business with a high school diploma. One was a great guy, who after getting injured in the NFL had few prospects. All he had ever done was play football, and no one had ever taught him how to do anything much else. He flunked out of school shortly after getting hurt, when it wasn’t worth faking his grades anymore.

There were a lot of over privileged , over paid (yes, paid) kids running around disrupting the school. Saw it at ISU, UNL, and Mizzou.

Still like football, but at some point I came to the opinion that it wasn’t serving the players or the fans, but only the checkbook of the school. I would rather have the players paid (like a minor league baseball team) and split from the school.

What you said, what I said and more. A skinny little beanpole like me could never had played football at any level, but I did OK in baseball. I was constantly being thrown out at first by a half step or so until I learned I could bat just about as well from the left side of the plate and make up that step.

There is also a certain beauty in the symmetry, isn't there?

For me 5 to 10 years ago spectator sports in general fell off a cliff in terms of my interest. My big sports were car racing and baseball but I could watch football basketball and ice hockey and others with interest. The last Olympics (summer) I watched any appreciable amount of competition was 2000 in Sydney. The last winter was in 2010 in Vancouver. Last year I watched none of the sports mentioned except short snippets. I watched the last quarter of the Super Bowl and the finish.

I still have residual interest but all it amounts to is checking occasionally scores and standings. I still read FR sports threads. Why did my interest wane. Probably multiple reasons but to me over saturation of games and just about everything no longer made any sports event special anymore was probably the biggest. The NFL has other problems than over saturation. I don’t expect the NFL to lose number one status just yet but it’s no longer the bullet proof league it once was.

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