The Ringer NFL Show - The Future of Football (Ep. 149)

Episode Date: September 28, 2017

The Ringer’s Kevin Clark and Bryan Curtis predict the effects of recent events from the week in football by questioning what the NFL’s united front in response to President Trump's comments means (1:21), debating how diagnosing CTE in living people would stifle the popularity of football (11:18), and speculating on whether Trump’s attacks on the NFL will continue (30:17). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Runger NFL show. I'm Kevin Clark. It's a very special episode of joined by Brian Curtis at The Runner.com. Brian, how are you? Good. How are you doing? I'm okay. We're here to focus on the future of football. That's what we're tackling because this is the weirdest week I can remember of football. And there's so many false alarms about football being at a crossroads or being in a turning point. Maybe football's dying. We've been hearing it all of our lives, certainly. It'll have we reached peak football. But I can't remember a weirder, week of football than this. First of all, you have Donald Trump not only attacking the players, but then as recently as Wednesday is saying the business is going to hell if they don't stop. That was different. That was new. Yeah, this is a new phenomenon in the football's dying narrative. And then I think most crucially, on Tuesday, Boston University announced they think there is a way forward to test for CT in living people. Now, the test is far away, but that would have massive ramifications on not only the NFL, but the sport. and the way we view the sport.

So it is a very odd time to be the sport of football right now. Brian, how would you characterize this week as opposed to every other the NFL is doomed take you've heard for the last 30 years? This one is unique because there are multiple reasons it could be doomed. Right. And also, I mean, we'll talk about CTE in a second, but I think politically speaking, having the president of the United States just attacking the league over and over again. I think there were 24 tweets.

There were definitely 20 plus in four days when the president. president staff said he was not interested in the NFL. He has tweeted about the NFL more than I have. Oh, absolutely. It's my job to tweet about the NFL. Right. Much more than the catastrophe in Puerto Rico, for instance, and other matters of state. But I just think in terms of pure volume, the arrows coming at the NFL have never been more than over the last four days. So I think we're in agreement here that if the NFL business model, quote, goes to hell, it's not because Donald Trump said so or because of the anthem protest. And one of the things I always harp on, and I think it's worth understanding, is there were some quote-unquote protests last year,

and the amount of people who watched the games actually went up. The reason the NFL ratings went down last year is that people were watching less of the games. People just watched less television now. Maybe they were watching the election last year. They're watching hurricane coverage this year. It's just a little more of a splintered media environment. And so there was no boycott last year,

and there will be no boycott this year. Having said that, Brian, ratings, even though they're up 3% on the whole, you had an extenuating circumstances as far as the Cowboys playing on Monday night. just the game window, some of them were down. Long term, where do you think the NFL's ratings are going? I think the NFL has been sort of, you know, they have resisted the path of all television,

which is down, all network television, we should say, right? Which is down. All television, because in Netflix and Amazon, for as much as we talk about them, are getting a fraction of viewers that, you know, not even just friends, but like, you know, what was popular 10 years ago? Right, getting sucked into the standard universe. And I think that the interesting question to me is always whether the bot, when we say decline, people always think of like this trapdoor opening and the NFL falling in and disappearing forever, right? Nobody ever going to watch football again, as opposed to merely being the most popular sport by a modest margin, by a slightly large margin rather than a giant margin, right?

Which has been basically what the NFL has been for since the late 50s most popular sport in America? Absolutely. America's favorite sport. A couple of years ago, an NFL executive says something I've never forgotten, which is, that they used to at NFL owners meetings, take a chart out, and they used to compare football with baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, whatever the hell you want to do, right? And then one year, they were like, you know what? The graph looks ridiculous because we're winning so much.

We're just going to compare with all of television. And they did that, and it still looked ridiculous because even the Big Bang theory can't compete with Sunday night football or can't compete with the AFC championship game and the NFC championship game still get 50 million people. And that's with the Falcons. The Falcons, who, by the way, if you've ever seen the traffic on a falcon story, not a popular team, not a popular team. So I think generally it's fascinating because what Trump is doing right now is he's taking on literally the last thing in America that we do in mass. Everything else has splintered off.

I remember Brian Rola, basically the head of revenue at the NFL saying one time, you know, flat is the new up for everybody else except the NFL. where up is the new up and they keep going up, right? And so there is nothing that gets people engaged like the NFL. And Trump is going to war. He thinks he's winning. He's not going to stop. He thinks this is a culture war that he's winning. And it is going to be fascinating to see where it goes from here.

So the funny thing to me is the conservative defense of football. And Trump is making it from the NFL itself, right? From NFL owners, from kneeling players, that kind of thing, predates Trump by a couple of years. A bunch of culture warrior types on the right said, America is a bunch of nanny staters who wouldn't legislate the risk out of American life, right? They're going to take your big gulps. And then the next thing they're going to do

is take your football away. Right? There was this book, the conservative case for football. Politicians kind of used it. A lot of football made me a man takes in like 2011. A lot of football made me a man takes. Yep, exactly.

And I think about 2014, there was another little boomlet of it. Well, there was the Ray Rice situation. Football was under attack. Yes, in American life. Like a lot of things in American life, right? football has come under attack. If you want to understand that, you should work at the Wall Street Journal. I don't know who worked in this conversation.

I was going to say, who can tell us about that. I don't know somebody else, I'm sure. But Trump picked up on this on the trail. October, a month before the election is when he said infamously that all these players are getting a little ding on the head, quote unquote, and have to go to the sidelines. That was his initial. As far as I know, that was the first thing he said about concussions. He may have talked about it first, but he was adopting this, right?

You know, what we like about football is violence. what we like it, and those guys want to take it away from you. You know, they want to wussify the game. They want to take away what we love about football. And this is a continuation of that argument, right, in slightly different form. Because he did talk about, we talk about Colin Kaepernick, but he also talked about hits the other night. When supporting the now vanquished Mr. Luther Strange in Alabama, he talked about hits. And this is a part now of politics, not a huge part of it.

But now Trump has, of course, taken it from, you know, the 100th thing on the list and made it like number two behind. behind tax reform. Okay, number one, tax reform is number two. Number three is we might go to nuclear war with North Korea. Right. You got to make sure that Derek Anderson stands for the National Anthem. I like the power rankings. These are our new power ranking. North Korea, number three.

Here's what's funny to me is the attack on football was so pointed and vicious that... On the NFL. Yes, on the NFL. That even the most conservative owners now have to move very far left. Jerry Richardson, who was the last owner to support any, to even release a statement, had to sort of release some sort of milk toast, you know, comments. And then today, after his players got upset, he said, I support you players to do whatever you need to do.

And so literally, Trump is to the right of all 31 NFL owners, which almost seems impossible. And you have to wonder, I don't know if Donald Trump's going to be running for every election, but Donald Trump taking on a bunch of billionaires seems like a very odd thing to do. It really is amazing, isn't it? I mean, just the side of Jerry Jones kneeling on the field is not something I ever thought I'd see in my lifetime. We had this little moment of unity, to use a word, where we all felt like, yes, we've all come together against the President Trump. And then there was this backlash by Monday. I think Shannon Sharp was probably part of that. I think that's been, you know, coming in saying the protests that were about police brutality have now been co-opted by these billionaire owners.

How do we feel about that idea? I agree in the macro sense that these. were very specific things. And one of the things that I keep harping on is these protests that quote unquote anthem protests are not anthem protests or flag protests at all. They were a specific protest. Colin Kaepernick made very clear why he was kneeling. Eric Reid in the New York Times, as recently as this week, made clear why he was kneeling, police brutality, racial injustice. And I think that we've gotten to this weird realm where we think that raising your fist or taking a knee or locking arms is the centerpiece of that. And that's not the case. Colin Kaepernick gave out

suits outside of parole office. Marcus Peters got a family trapped in Singapore into the country by getting them lawyers. Malcolm Jenkins has done countless things, touring prisons, working on prison reform. I mean, it's really incredible what those guys have done, and yet it all gets boiled down to, well, they took a knee. And so I think that the on-field protest has been co-opted, and I think the media needs to do a better job of separating the fact that there's a difference between what goes on in the field and sort of the political activism that goes on in the NFL. I think that the owners, this is a one-time thing for the owners. Jerry Jones is not going to be back next week. What I think is going to happen is the fact that Jerry Jones took a knee, the fact that Daniel Snyder was on the field and said,

you know, whatever. I mean, all of those were almost universally hollow gestures, but I think that players will feel more comfortable speaking out because the owners have now said, I don't care what you do. Malcolm Jenkins talked a lot about the fear of repercussions throughout the league. And that's why he did, when he was here doing a podcast and that's very stage, he talked about the fear of repercussions throughout the league is a reason you don't speak out. Those repercussions do not exist anymore. So there would only be more politics coming out. Well, or at least they'll be in.

Everybody's on the record, right? Yep. The part of the Colin Kaepernick thing, right, is nobody was quite on the record. Right. No one's, oh, well, you know, just don't need a quarterback this year. But now everybody's on the record. So if you're in that Cowboys locker room, you know, you can say, well, Jerry Jones went out on the field and told me that everyone has a right to free expression in this

country. So why can't I talk about a politically uncomfortable thing? I think it's funny. It's a tension in lefty sports writing. which I'm certainly a part, that's also a tension in protest movements. Do we keep this purer? Right. Or do we let people that want to come halfway?

Do we accept them as allies, right? So Jerry Jones is not going to join Antifa, right? So Jerry Jones kneeling in a fairly empty but symbolic gesture with the players is as far as he's going to go. Can we all agree on that? So do we want that? Or do we look at Jerry Jones and say, screw you get away from us? And I just, I think that's a really fascinating question to me.

I think it's probably in the balance, as you say, it's in the player's interest because it's like, okay, this guy just said I can have free speech. This guy said we can talk about political stuff that doesn't get talked about in NFL locker rooms or didn't before the last couple years, right? It's so funny how toxic the NFL culture is that the idea that Jerry Jones said we can have free speech is actually a real talking point. I mean, it is so beyond the pale. It is insane. And also it's funny you say that that's the tension in lefty sports media. It's also the tension in just the left wing of America. what I mean. Yeah. If you're a centrist, are you allowed? I mean, it's... In the Democratic Party right now.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, this is like, do we, do we want you? Do we want you? Or do we want the pure vision of what is? And there's not a great answer to that. There's not a overwhelming answer to that question. Though I think in this case, but not for the future of football podcast on the ringer.com. But I think in this case, it probably redounds the player's benefit that those guys. However, you know, they didn't mean it. They had to do it. Right. I mean, like, you know, but they're out there. It's something. Brian, switching gears a little bit. This CTE study that came out from Boston University on Tuesday is a massive story within football. I don't know if it resonated with the public as much, but it should because it has the capability to rock the sport, truly.

So if you don't know what happened, Boston University, who's been one of the researchers on the forefront of concussion study, released a study that said they think they may have found a way to test for CTE, which is a degenerative brain disease linked to football, to test for that in living people. Now you can only test for it in deceased people. We only find out after football players' life has ended, whether or not they actually had the brain damage. We suspected they have. This is a game changer because there are a million reasons you would want to know if you have CTE or not want to know, quite frankly, when you're playing mid-career,

and that could lead to more players quitting the sport. That could lead to more players never starting the sport. It has so many liability issues as far as lawsuits go. I mean, you know, Claire McNair tackled this really effectively for the ringer on Wednesday, and she basically just said, it's getting harder and harder to defend football, and it will be even harder and harder once we know if these guys have CT while they're playing.

Is it a big deal to you? Sure, because I don't want to be flip about this, but it sort of almost puts a scoreboard on a murky thing. You know, if you say that we think lots of football players, current active football players have CTE. How do we know? We don't know. We don't know and we won't know until many decades into the future.

Well, if you can say, oh, this guy has mild CTE, This guy has severe CT. Oh, I think it just takes something that's very hard to illustrate to people. And maybe if this turns out to be correct, this new study or this new method turns out to be correct, then maybe you can illustrate it to fans. There's a couple of things that I find fascinating. Number one is that there was a study done a couple months ago that basically linked longer careers to more severe cases of CTB.

It may sound obvious, but you don't know for sure. More hits to the head makes you more susceptible to. higher degrees of CT. There are degrees of CT, certainly. It took a while to have that scientifically proven. Now it's proven. So now all of a sudden, Aaron Hernandez had CT. He played until he was, what, 26 years old? So who knows when he got it? But a lot of these guys who stopped their career pretty early still have CT. I think it's like 80 of 90. Just college football players had it in that study that came out last month. And so we're getting into a situation where if you find out, if this is 20, 25, And you're 22 years old and you take the test because your college makes you or your agent makes you or your family makes you.

And you find out you have CTE. What do you do? Because that is the question that will define the future of football. What do you do when you find out you have mild grade CTE and it's only to get worse if you go in the NFL? Because once enough players start opting out or if what if you can't get insured? What if NFL insurance companies won't let a guy on the field if he has CET? because they're worried about, you know, a lawsuit in the future. CTE, by the way, is not covered in the settlement with the league between the ex-player

because CTE was not provable in living humans. So what happens now? Seth Joyner, the former Eagles player, was tweeting the other day. You know, he wants to go back to the courtroom and just sue again. And so this is going to affect things more than anyone thinks. And I do think... The danger for football is participation in football. Yeah.

Not fans seeing old men who can't remember. their names. No. But it is participation, cutting off participation at a younger level. As cynical as it sounds, being disgusted by the NFL hasn't had a meaningful impact yet. America being disgusted by the NFL has not had a meaningful impact because we know this, man. We've known it since 2005 when the New York Times started reporting it. We've known it for 12 years what happens scientifically.

We've known anecdotally. We've all, you know, oh, football is tough on the body. We've done that for 85 years. Yeah, I was going to say. I mean, you know, Mike Utley. gets paralyzed on the field and we go, oh, that's really, really sad. That's a bummer, man. Yeah, exactly. Ratings went up from 2005 to 2014, which was the age when we found out everything there is to know about CTE and its effects and what it does. And, you know, the fact that you can get it from practice, you can get it from high school football, college football, one practice in the NFL. We know, we know now what football does to the human body and it hasn't impacted fan behavior at all. What is going to end football? eventually. It could be 60 years from now, could be 100 years from now, could be 20 years from now.

When I say, and I don't mean the league is going to shut down. I mean irrelevance to the point of NASCAR or boxing. Yeah, it's on the practice squad. Right, vague irrelevance, right? Undraft of free agent. What's going to kill that eventually is the talentful. That the reason boxing isn't as popular is because Anthony Joshua right now is the top heavyweight in the world. No one knows who Anthony Joshua is. If I do, I tried to sell my friends with Anthony Joshua the other day. Nobody cared, right? And so I just think you get into a situation where it's unwatchable, it's unwatchable, and then

you're done. I agree that participation is the scariest thing for them. If people are in mass for these reasons or other reasons to stop playing football. If you lose 20% of your talent pool, the NFL now looks unwatchable. And even then, I was talking to somebody about this the other day. Let's say I'm the guy who wants to play, I have two years

a P, I need to take care of in high school. And I want to play football. But then I read all these stories. My parents get really scared, and I don't do that. I probably like football. less than I would have if I played a couple years and understood the game, right? Maybe I watch a little bit less. And then, you know, there's not even just like talent pool, like going to the NFL talent pool, right? There's just participation makes you into the game, makes you like the game, or makes you play more video games or whatever, right? It redounds to some bigger definition of football.

I think it's fine. The boxing, you wrote about this on the ringer.com, we should say, a big article about this. And you did the boxing comparison. Yes. So here's the only difference I would say off the top of my head. Boxing also had the problem of all its best fights were not on free television. They were on closed circuit pay-per-view stuff like that, right? So the NFL in the short term anyway, and as you say, we're talking about like a 50, 60 year timeline here, but the short term anyway, all

of the NFL games are very easily watchables, but at least the big games. Right. So TV will lift the NFL through a crisis. Traditional television. Traditional television is going away. But if I can watch them free, let's say I can watch them free on Twitter or Amazon or wherever. Yeah, but boxing, I still have to pay, even if I watch it on my computer.

You're competing against everything else that's on a computer. Once you get into that, then you're competing against YouTube videos of like, you know, babies biting each other's fingers or whatever, which is just great content. Which is better than the Jeff. Which is just great content. If you watch the NFL these days, I mean, come on. And so I feel like the NFL right now has been in traditional television. I have this odd take that oddly fighting sports, both MMA and boxing, will eventually look okay, especially economically, because they're set up for a la carte already. They're already getting 60 bucks for the mega fight or 100 bucks if it's the quote unquote money fight. And so I think that in 20

years when there's a collapse of cable television, when the NBA and the NFL can't get ABC and NBC to pay up, then I think you get, you know, boxing is going to have a great economic model, which is we've already trained these people to spend 100 bucks every time there's a good fight. The NFL would love that. The NFL would love to charge 100 bucks for 50 million people to watch the AFC championship game, but they haven't gone that way. I think that the NFL. NFL is in for a, not a rude awakening because they know, but I think that they need to be aware that the $22 billion television package they got last time is going to be, I don't think it's going to be hard to come by this time because we're only a couple years away. I think next time,

I don't think Amazon or Apple or Netflix is going to bid nearly as aggressively as the networks who need football to survive. If football goes away from traditional networks, the networks will rot away. I mean, if you look at those ratings, it is pretty much football and then, like, you know, young Sheldon, and then like, you know, the small percentage of people who, even though it's considered a rating success watch, like, this is us. Yeah. I mean, and also, I think when you, when you go to Amazon, if you make that jump, they're not going to spend as much money on the games. Football is amazing on television right now. You know why? Because they're spending as much money or just about as much as they ever have on it, right? It's like the last thing on television where the

budget is still giant. Right. We still pay Joe Buck millions and millions of dollars to be like really good announcer. We still get a billion cameras and all those graphics that are on Sunday night football. So the funny thing about this to me, while we're under this old television model, is that they're not going to talk about this stuff very much, right? Print, New York Times, places like this, you mentioned.

There are lots and lots of stories about CET. There will be as many stories as the material holds up, right? They'll just continue to report on this. But when you watch game on television, these kinds of things aren't the injury. my favorite thing about watching football TV is guy laying down the field, injured, horribly mangled, let's go to a commercial. Then you see these beer commercials that are really goofy,

and then you come back and the guy's gone. And maybe you get one update on him, but nobody turns to the color guy and says, well, that guy's life is never going to be the same. You know what happens when you get injuries like that, Al? You don't walk right for the rest of your life. You just forget about it. We look at it not as a life-changing event, which it is.

I remember a point a couple of years ago. I forget who said, it, but it was basically like, guy gets a head injury. Oh, thank God, he got up. He's okay. Yeah, for 25 years. He's okay. And then one day, you know, it all comes crashing down. And that's football. And we don't think about it enough. There was a study I linked to in the ringer column that I wrote. 10% of all concussions are dramatically downplayed in the media. You saw it the other day with the Houston Texans having all of their tight ends concussed. And the NFL, to their credit, got out in front of it and said, this is not systematic. They looked at it from a health and safety standpoint, but I don't

think most of the media did. I think most of the media looked at it as, well, who's Deshaun Watson going to throw it to? Oh, they're all the tight ends are concussed. And it's like, meanwhile, you have three guys whose life will never be the same. And I think it's very interesting that the media has not adapted to the realities that we know. But you know why? Because football is really fun to watch. And as soon as the game comes on, everybody forgets, right? This is the nature of me, even the most thoughtful, thoughtful, thoughtful lefty sports writer. I'm not talking about anybody here in particular. I'm not talking about anybody here in particular, this thoughtful, you know, person who's going to go into these off-the-field injuries as soon as that game starts.

You ever look at Twitter? In case you missed it, my piece on the guy who just scored the touchdown. Oh, it's a great story. You know, he had a great upbringing. People forget. They sense that the audience doesn't want to think about that stuff during the game. I think the audience wants a break, right? We can talk about concussions all week.

We can talk about Trump all week. But once the game starts, can't we just have a really good football game? And I think sports writers in that sense just follow what the audience wants. But amazingly, the data spares that out. They don't care. They want to watch the game. Absolutely. This is why football is popular, right?

People like to watch it on television. You know, they really like the games. As you said, it looks amazing on television. And fantasy football is set up for this. Gambling is set up for this. And so the only way that it becomes less popular is if it gets less amazing as a product. And that can only happen if there's a talent pool drainage. And I think that's legitimate.

You know, it's interesting to me. I just read a book on Jack Dempsey. And I guess there was a talent pool problem in boxing in like 1960. You know, it never ends, right? And Roger Con asked him, what does boxing need to replenish the ranks? And Jack Dempsey said, another great depression. And I think about that a lot because I don't know if it's a good point or not. It's certainly a point, but it's not a good line. It's a great line. It's a great line. But, I mean, I wonder about where the socioeconomic roles come in with a talent pool. I went to school at the University of Miami. I covered a lot of guys who football was their escape. They had to get out because they went to a school in Liberty City and they had tough upbrings, et cetera. etc. And you wonder, there was a pretty healthy debate today, sort of on Twitter and some other places, especially around the ringer, about whether or not the talent pool ever drained because it's just certain guys who can play football and will play football. Aaron Foster earlier this week was

asked, do you regret playing football? And he said, I got my family out. Nothing else matters. And I think he's scared certainly the after effects of CTE, but that's sort of how he views it. And so I think that it will be a slower process than people think as far as the talent. pool. I think even if you can get diagnosed with CTE at 20 and certain liability issues arise, I do think there will be people who don't care. But I do think all it takes is a small, small percentage of would-be superstars to step away from the game. I mean, right now, if the 2025 version of Vaughn Miller and Josh Norman and Aaron Rogers stepped away, that's three games that look significantly worse every Sunday. Sure. Yeah, to me, the big one is like an Archie

Manning going to his sons and say, you know what, I'd rather you play baseball. Right. You're to be great at whatever you do because I'm just going to make your life just about whatever sports is, you know. Why don't you just play baseball? Or why don't you play soccer? Why don't you just do something else? And we're going all in on that. And there goes your, you know, all American quarterback. Well, Tom Brady's father said he may not let his son play football if Tom Brady were a child in this era. So that's all you need to think about is that if Tom Brady were born in 1998, he wouldn't be playing football. It's amazing. He'd be a, you'd be writing cookbooks, but nobody would care. He'd be just a health nut. It'd be one of these Twitter guys talking about avocado ice cream.

These sports. Yeah, he'd be a gamer. Long term with football. When or if does it stop in the most popular sport in America and how does it happen? And what replaces it? That's a really good question. We work in a place where there's a lot of NBA, you know, the NBA's coming, baby sentiment. I don't believe that football is going to be replaces our most popular sport for a really long time.

Also, football has uniquely among, if you look at that Harris survey that comes out every once in a while, pro and college football. So it's a double-sided coin. You can see people, right, following Trump or for whatever reasons they have kind of being out in the NFL. Are they going to stop rooting for Miami and Texas? They're just going to abandon.

I think that's a harder thing to abandon in a way. Or maybe they get sick of college players not being paid so they're just like the NFL. I still think football's going to be number one for a long time. Well, the college player's not being paid thing is another example of something that everybody agrees on but no one stops watching because of the moral objection.

Yeah, present company included. I think generally I agree. with you. I think that there is the issue of if CTE can be diagnosed in a 21-year-old, when does, and it wouldn't happen at Miami or Texas or USC, but when does the University of North Carolina say, we're tired of getting sued by these kids who we put in the field even though we know they have CTE? Yeah. And are they going to make them sign a waiver? Is the NFL going to make them sign a waiver? Hey, we know you have CTE, you got to play anymore. I mean, can we afford to have college football? Can we afford to have college football? It gets into that. That's why I think no one is thinking enough about the layers of

the CTE thing, when you can know someone has CTE in real time. And if a state, we live in California, which is one of the most liberal states, what is preventing California state legislature from saying, hey, every high school player at age 18 has to be tested for CTE. A lot of places test for heart problems that have ended college careers. So what happens if you have CTE at age 19? Oh, I think that's a really good question. There have been countless. You know this. You follow recruiting. Not a critical mass, but there have certainly been a lot of players since I started following recruiting, you know, 15 years ago when I was in middle school that you have some heart defect and he's not clear to play. He never plays. He joins the coaching staff or whatever. It's like two competing values, right?

It's that concern versus the ability of the public to look at that, nod their heads very solemnly and process it move on. You know, and I think there's probably a lot of the latter too, you know. I mean, I remember did a piece for Texas Monthly years ago about a fifth grade football team. It was tackle. They were on the spread in a, you know, fairly well-to-do Texas community. But, you know, the parents knew all about this stuff. And they weren't worried about it. And there's not a single one of them that was just like, boy, this scares me to death. They say, eh, it's a concern definitely. I'm worried about it. I know about concussions. I've heard and read all these things. But Sonny is going to play football because it's important to me. And it connects me with the community or it's something his dad really wants him to do or his mom really wants him to do. We shouldn't underestimate the willingness of people

to process the information and then just go, yeah, I'm okay with it. The word you're looking for is complicity. I'm kidding. This is a very special. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. All right. Kevin's calling out the parents of America. Yeah, yeah. No, no. I'm joking. That's the headline. I played high school football. It was fine. It was interesting to me when I was going and researching this is reading a lot of boxing. And when Ali started to show the symptoms that he showed of Parkinson's syndrome, there were a lot of essays about the brutality of boxing.

And is this morally defensible? And people would go to Michigan and walk around with him and listen to him. Yeah. And try to talk. And there were, but the problem is there's a lot of cases like that, man. There's a lot of guys who didn't age well in boxing, and it didn't matter. That wasn't the reason that boxing became less popular. There were a million other reasons. The sport stopped being fun to watch, and that's when it happens. And that's why I keep harping on this.

The moment the sport stops looking amazing, which is a watchability issue, if everything becomes... But they're connected, right? They're connected. You have the example of Ali and all these, you know, sort of fallen champions. that cuts off the talent pool. Then the sport becomes bad. That's what I'm saying, yes. So it's a connection.

So Ali is a key piece. Ali is a key piece. But it's, but it has to come all the way back around. The thing is, we've seen key pieces in the NFL. I mean, the junior seowal suicide is as impactful as anything I can remember. But we won't find out the after effects of that for years.

Because the guys who are rookies now, let's say they started in seventh grade. That's 2008. we didn't know as much as we know now. No. So we're going to have to wait until 2025, 2030 to see did all the quarterbacks who would have played stop playing? Are they e-gaming now? That's why you asked when you say favorite sport.

I just said, I think football is probably good for 10 plus years. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think maybe 25 years. In that number one slot. I think it's 25 years. I also think that sports as a whole is going to take a hit. I think that the splintered culture we talk about, is going to turn its head towards sports.

And we're going to get a situation where instead of, you know, 15 of those Harris choices for favorite sport, you're going to see 60. I mean, I don't even know how specific it gets, but I mean, people can find their own hobby and stick with it. You just, you watch the YouTube videos, you just stay on the message board of the hobby and the sport, and all of a sudden you like base jumping as much as someone used to like to football. Yeah, and full disclosure to listeners, too, you were playing punchout before we walked over here to the studio. I was playing, Jason Concep Show and brought a Super Nintendo into the office. And I was playing Punchout.

You're part of the problem, Kevin. That was the golden age of boxing. What are you going to mark on the Harris survey? It came out in 1994. Wow. The golden age of boxing was when Punch Out 2 came. Wow. Okay.

Last thing. Donald Trump. Where does he take this? Where does it go? To hell? I don't know. I think here's some things we need to remember about Trump. His attention span is very short, number one.

Number two, he has talked about football roads in the morning. a couple of days ago, which is that he has talked about Colin Kaepernick in concert with a major policy failure or crisis in his administration. When he talked about him in March, it was the day that James Comey announced, then director James Comey announced that he was investigating the Trump campaign's complicity with Russia. So Donald Trump might have a success and might not want to talk about Colin Kaepernick. I think it's sort of unpredictable, right? I suspect that his interest in football, I mean, this prediction is like feels like it's going to be. wrong, but I suspect he'll squeeze this

orange a little bit more. They move on to other stuff and it'll just kind of sporadically come up. Again, it's part, it'll be part of his repertoire, but I don't know, he's not on his for weeks and weeks and weeks, is he? I don't think so, and here's what. I think he thinks he's winning. He said, he's told people he thinks he's winning. I can't believe he thinks he's winning.

Wait, he thinks he got the winning issue on the winning hand on this one? He thinks he got the W. Alex Perrine, who is, I think, one of the best political writers out there, he writes all the time about how Trump basically realizes he's done something people like and then just keeps doing it. I don't think that's one of these things. I think that as much as he'd love to bring this up, every time there's going to be a major policy failure.

And I think that that is probably going to happen more and more often. When if you see the popularity numbers of Mitch McConnell, what we learned about in Alabama last night, as far as America's view of Mitch McConnell and where the Republican establishment is going, I think there'll be more policy failures. Having said that, I don't think this will prove to be a winning thing for Trump. But see, I think it's funny. There was some couple of pieces that when he, in front of the crowd in Alabama, it really worked. People loved it. People, that was his... Yeah, but that was an anthem. They wasn't just attacking. Now he's attacking all of sports. Right, but that, it sort of worked. And then he came back to Washington and was talking to his

advice and said, what do you think? What do you think? And they said, I mean, he probably just made it up on the spot. But I think Trump knows his audience. I mean, I think Trump is doing everything he can to hold on to 40%, right? To take that 40% that's going to be with him through hell or high water and just keep them happy. Right. And I think, yeah, I mean, I think, look, he's going to have anthem protesters for the rest of the year to attack. Whether he attacks all of football and all of team sports is really strange, but I just think he'll come back to it at some point a couple times. And I think the live audience is where he talks about this stuff. You know, it's better, it's better live for him than it is in

in a press conference setting. I don't know. It's a better live song for him. It doesn't like the studio version. You haven't, you haven't heard Trump attack football unless you've heard it live. I agree with you. I think he's going to retire it for a while. I just think that There's nothing else to say. Yeah, that's the other things you run out of material, right? Like, I think this Sunday... Does Roger Goodell get a nickname? Is there a Lion Roger?

Oh, wow. In our future? For the first of all... Crooked Roger. First of all, if you saw some of the reaction to Roger Goodell's statement, Roger Goodell, congratulations on joining the resistance. He's now a liberal... He's now a liberal hero.

Like his dad? Like his dad. He finally got the liberal hero label he's so craved. I thought it was very fascinating to see that Roger Goodell's Good Now takes from the Internet. Isn't that amazing? It's everybody. What a time to be alive. All of the people who were just universally reviled on the internet last week are now leaders because they took on Trump. With milk toast statements, it didn't take much. Yeah. Woke Roger Goodell is something I never thought I'd live to see. I really never thought I'd live to see. But do we think he attacks Roger Goodell personally for a long period of time? Do we think there's a lion, Roger, Crooked Roger? I don't think so. I don't think so. That's tough. I also think. I also think. But he knows Roger Goodell's unpopular, right?

Right. It doesn't have anything to do with Trump, but he knows Roger Goodell's really unpopular, so that's a soft target. But he also, Donald Trump has shown a love and a supernatural love of rich people. He loves rich people. Like, Gadell might be as, you know, secretary of health and human services. I think you're on to something. I think he might be, it might replace Tom Price after this.

I mean, I don't, I don't know. I think that it's easier for him to win the culture war by taking on the quote-unquote millionaire athletes. What was the phrase? Millionaire sport athletes? Did he talk to a British advisor? Who says sport except like BBC presenters? Yeah, it's clear what the main target is.

But I think it's fascinating. Is there an NFL owner that sort of does Adam Silver, you know, who's in other? Does Steve Kerr, Greg Popovich get a direct response, right? Who are all part of this tapestry? You know, I mean, I think it's interesting. Like who does use? No, I mean, Jamel Hill got a direct response. Yeah.

We can I keep talking about predicting these things. I didn't think he was going to take. take on the entire NFL and then in two days it would become NFL owners versus Trump. You and me both, buddy. You just can't predict the Donald Trump presidency, Brian. You just can't do it. It's all going to come down to turnout. All right.

Well, Woke Roger Goodell is as good a note to end on as any. It is. Thanks for coming, Brian. Thanks for having me.