Football is the sport.
How do we know?
NFL football is not only the most popular sport by a two to one ratio, but also the most heavily watched form of televised entertainment in the country.
Of the 100 most-watched TV shows in America in 2024, 70 were football games. Topping that list was the Super Bowl, which attracted 130 million viewers.
We’ve never had a situation like this. It’s no wonder that streaming services have joined networks to bid billions of dollars for these games.
Football – from high school to college to the NFL – is facing three big challenges that have already resulted in unintended consequences that may threaten the sport.
NIL
The ability of Name, Image and Likeness, also known as NIL, to help athletes make money is causing a revolution in college and even high school sports.
Previously, athletes, especially from disadvantaged homes, felt exploited because they weren’t living at the same standard as other students, and they couldn’t work to supplement their income. They would see their numbers on jerseys for sale and witness the big crowds in stadiums and read about the big TV contracts. Of course, college football wasn’t unspoiled prior to NIL as alumni and agents gave money under the table to athletes.
NIL was supposed to fairly pay the college athletes. Instead, it’s turned athletes into professionals at a much earlier age. Nowadays, you now have 15-year-olds in high school branding themselves, putting together a website, a logo and releasing content.
Alumni businessman on all the major campuses have banded together to use money for recruiting, which is now a form of free agency where large school like USC, Ohio State and University of Alabama may pay millions of dollars for a promising quarterback. The same happens with the transfer portal, which is a second chance for an athlete to switch schools for a nicer paycheck.
It’s creating a two-tiered system of schools that will distance the top four collegiate conferences with everybody else. Eventually, the four most prominent conferences – the SEC, the Big 10, the ACC and the Big 12 – will get rid of the NCAA and will negotiate their own TV contracts and establish their own rules. It will affect the ability of the less rich schools to support non-revenue sports like men’s crew or women’s sports.
Officials need to find a way to take NIL money to not only to benefit the most gifted athletes but also as a pool that would be shared by all the athletes.
Part of what has made college athletics so fun is the regionality and the rivalry that has occurred year after year. In the Pac 12, within an hour, you could fly to the Bay Area or Arizona.
I went to University of California, Berkeley, where you could see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean. UC Berkeley is now in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The big cultural events and rivalries are gone like USC against UC Berkeley or Stanford.
Now you’re talking about cross-country trips to places like Pennsylvania. It requires significant travel time, adds more pressure on young athletes to perform while also adjusting to the time zone changes and wreaks havoc with their academic studies.
Gambling
There was forever an impregnable wall between pro sports and gambling. There were never supposed to be teams in Las Vegas because of gambling. Player contracts often had rules about not interacting with gamblers.
Nowadays, Las Vegas has a hockey team and a professional football team; it will soon add a baseball team and inevitably a NBA team. It’s become one of the sport centers of the country.
However, gambling is an existential threat to football. Two big problems exist.
One, the athlete who gets compromised by gambling debts and is now tempted to shave performance, especially in this era of prop bets, where wagers can be placed on specific outcomes like the number of yards a player gains or whether they hit the over or under on a given stat. You can bet on athletic productivity, quarter by quarter. All it would take is an athlete to tell a gambler beforehand that he’ll pull himself out of a game at such and such a time.
The second is inside information.
One time, I visited Troy Aikman in his hotel room before a Dallas Cowboys game. What I knew that no one else knew was his thumb had swelled up to the size of a pickle. Clearly, he wouldn’t be able to play in the next day’s game. If that information leaked, a gambler would have inside advantage.
As fans, we believe that the games are played on an even playing field with the same rules. Both teams are trying as hard as they can to win in an actual athletic contest.
The minute the fans ever suspect that the games are not played on an even playing field, it’s a slippery slope to pro wrestling, which we know is an entertainment where the results are all fixed and planned out. If the NFL or college football becomes perceived as pro wrestling, television ratings will disappear as well as attendance. And the value of pro franchise as well as player salaries will collapse.
The Concussion Foundation
I had a crisis of conscience back in the 1980s because I represented half of the starting NFL quarterbacks, who kept getting hit in the head. We’d visit doctors to ask how many concussions one should suffer before retiring. They had no answers, so I started holding brain health conferences, with the first one in Newport Beach in 1994 with Steve Young and Warren Moon, among others. In 2006, a neurologist told us he thought the magical number was three and then you started to risk eventual symptoms like Alzheimer’s.
Nowadays, football is safer because they enforce rules against helmet-to-helmet hits to protect the players. There is a concussion protocol where staffers in the press box and on the sidelines try to spot impaired players who are then benched. There are programs in football now that are being played with no hitting or contact in preseason or in the practices. They save all the hitting for the game.
Still, concussions are a ticking time bomb.
Every time an offensive lineman hits a defensive lineman at the inception of the play, it produces a low level sub-concussive event. A little change to the brain. An offensive lineman who played high school through college to a long pro career could have had 10,000 sub-concussions, none of which have been diagnosed. The aggregate does the same as a traumatic concussion.
If about 50% of the moms in this country knew the relationship between football and brain damage and told their teenage sons they could play any sport except tackle football, the sport would change.
It won’t kill football; it will just change the nature of who plays it. Eventually you’ll get an erosion of talent, and it becomes a gladiator sport. The good news is that breakthroughs are occurring in the health industry that can heal a concussed brain.
The brain is the last frontier.
I recently formed a concussion foundation, The Leigh Steinberg Foundation for Concussion, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Brain Health to highlight awareness, prevention, and cure, with a focus on supporting underserved communities who cannot afford concussion care. I believe that collective action can create lasting positive change in the lives of those impacted by brain injuries.
We can change the narrative and promote a deeper understanding of brain health by educating athletes, families, and the general public about the risks and impacts of sub-concussive events, concussions, and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). New advanced diagnostic tools, prevention strategies and recovery treatments exist now. I kindly ask you to join me in this mission: making the game we all love safer, one player at a time: leighsteinbergfoundation.org.
