Bob Costas Imagines A World Without Football

Sportscaster Bob Costas joined former Washington Post columnists Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and USA Today columnist Christine Brennan at the University of Maryland’s 12th Shirley Povich Symposium on Tuesday for a discussion about the biggest changes in sports. According To The Washington Post, Costas and his fellow panelists all touched on something that would’ve been difficult to imagine 14 years ago: a future without football.

“There are issues, including, although it’s a serious issue, the protests going on now in the NFL,” Costas said. “Those issues come and go. The issue that is most substantial — the existential issue — is the nature of football itself. … The nature of football is this: Unless and until there is some technology which we cannot even imagine, let alone has been developed, that would make this inherently dangerous game not marginally safer, but acceptably safe, the cracks in the foundation are there. The day-to-day issues, serious as they may be, they may come and go. But you cannot change the basic nature of the game. I certainly would not let, if I had an athletically gifted 12- or 13-year-old son, I would not let him play football.”

“Some of the best people I’ve met in sports have been football people, but the reality is that this game destroys people’s brains. … That’s the fundamental fact of football, and that to me is the biggest story in American sports.”

Kornheiser suggested that football will eventually go the way of horse racing and boxing, two other sports that were once wildly popular.

“It’s not going to happen this year, and it’s not going to happen in five years or 10 years, but Bob is right: At some point, the cultural wheel turns just a little bit, almost imperceptibly, and parents say, ‘I don’t want my kid to play.’ And then it becomes only the province of the poor, who want it for economic reasons to get up and out, and if they don’t find a way to make it safe — and we don’t see how they will — as great as it is, as much fun as it is … the game’s not going to be around. It’s not.”