Tackle football currently dominates the landscape of our national culture like no sport has done for almost a century. Almost single-handedly, it is keeping the major television networks—otherwise in a death spiral of their own badly broken business model’s making—alive. The Super Bowl is now the last remaining annual non-holiday happening we can legitimately consider a communal event, uniting Americans of virtually all demographics, at least for about five hours. 

Paradoxically, tackle football, at least in the form we have come to know it, is also vanishing right before our eyes. Remarkably, though we live in a social media era that affords most subjects far more coverage and in far more detail than they deserve, almost no one is talking about this astonishing and seemingly contradictory development. 

It could not be more obvious to avid fans of professional and college (now “minor league professional”) football that this once uniquely American sport is far less physical than it was just five to ten years ago. It is also clear that those in charge of the sport are dedicated, for various—mostly economic—reasons, to continue to push the sport in this feminized direction. It seems they will not stop until the game that became so popular in the golden era of the television age—the 1970s and ’80s—that it overtook baseball as the national pastime is completely transformed. 

Quantifying exactly how soft tackle football has recently become is a difficult task. It is especially difficult for those under the age of 25 who, unless they happen to catch old clips on YouTube or TikTok, have little against which to compare the current version of football. Even at the professional level, the sport is now closer to the “flag” variety than the traditional “tackle” game. (In super-liberal California, where I live, there really isn’t even much need for helmets anymore, except in the top high school games).

While it is oddly never mentioned during football broadcasts, perhaps the best way to illustrate the dramatic change is just to look at the player’s uniforms. Skill players, especially in college ball, routinely wear what can only be called shorts—which are often further off the knee than the variety worn by their counterparts in basketball. Similarly, jerseys no longer have sleeves because the size of the shoulder pads has shrunk as significantly as the revenue ESPN receives from the badly ailing Golden Goose that was once cable television subscription fees.

The rules of the sport have been radically altered in an attempt to prevent injuries, especially concussions, at almost any cost. Tackles, which used to provoke roars from the crowd, can now—even without clear intent to injure an opponent—easily result in major penalties, ejections, suspensions, and fines. The defense has been so declawed that it seems almost miraculous when there are games during which the scoreboard doesn’t regularly light up like an old-school pinball machine. 

This fundamental change in the nature of the sport has been most obvious when it comes to protecting the quarterback—the most important and glamorous
position in this modern world where celebrity surpasses substance. Quarterbacks, who were regularly brutalized in the old game, are now so sheltered by the rules that they often taunt weaponless defenders by pretending to slide (thus ending the play and forcing the defense to avoid even breathing on them too heavily) or going out of bounds, before reversing course to pick up extra yardage, surely all the while flashing a Cheshire Cat grin. 

There have been several key moments that explain how we got to this point so rapidly, and why the pendulum has swung from America falling in love with a sport that was often far too violent, to the emasculation of tackle football to the point where the game is now so safe that it is paradoxically endangered. 

In 2015, Will Smith starred in a movie called Concussion, which focused largely on the horrors which befell several members of the iconic four-time Super Bowl championship team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, allegedly because of the physical toll a far more vicious version of the game had taken on their bodies and minds. One of the stars of that legendary team, the late Hall of Famer Franco Harris (who supported the film), became a rather close friend of mine, so this is a subject about which I am very familiar.

In short, concussions and their apparent connection to a debilitating brain condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—a connection that may be more complex than the simplistic media narrative surrounding it—became a mortal threat to the massive business that is the Football Industrial Complex. Wishing to avoid the fate of tobacco companies, the NFL led the way in subtly and quietly making the game safer, especially with respect to head injuries. 

Their intent, while motivated by survival, was mostly noble—as were a lot of the practical changes. There is no question that football is now much safer at every level of play than at any previous time. Ironically, parents are nevertheless now more hesitant than ever to allow their young children to play tackle football, particularly when the alternative of noncontact “flag football” is becoming so popular in its place. This is partially due to flag football’s open support from the NFL, to the point where it is slated to be an Olympic sport in 2028. 

As so often happens in this culture, however, we tend to overreact to every moral panic in order to properly signal our virtue, and things have gone too far in the other direction. 

In 2020, when the COVID panic overtook the Western world, tackle football was made vulnerable in ways that inflicted far more lasting harm than routinely
having to cancel games and greatly limiting crowd sizes. These measures—which now seem to have been motivated, at best, by societal symbolism and, at worst, by a political desire to prevent any resistance to the medical establishment—were damaging. But their direct impact on sports was largely temporary.

Thanks to the general overreaction to the COVID pandemic, however, we also fundamentally changed the rules of medical freedom. For the first time in modern history, it was “decided” that we as a society had the moral and legal authority to tell everyone else what kind of decisions they are allowed to make about their own medical risk management. (Please spare me the rebuttal that mask and vaccine mandates, among other tyrannical measures, somehow helped others not become infected, as we now have overwhelming data proving that always dubious premise was false.)  

Quite simply, in a country that no longer accepts the notion that adults are all allowed to make their own decisions regarding what kind of medical risk they want to accept, you just cannot have tackle football. At least not as it was before concussions became a major concern in the corporate news and sports media complex, thus endangering the sport’s huge profit margins. 

In October 2022, there was a seminal moment within corporate media that told us a lot about where things are today and where they are likely heading. On ESPN’s Monday Night Football telecast, color analyst Troy Aikman objected to an obviously absurd roughing-the-passer penalty by saying that the NFL needed to “take the dresses off the quarterbacks.”

Those of us who understand how lethal the cancel culture’s voluntary police force has become immediately braced for Aikman to get demolished. While he did get widespread criticism—more for alleged sexism than for criticizing a clearly ridiculous penalty—he also received enough support from those fed up with the cancel culture to survive the incident relatively unscathed. 

One of the many relevant aspects of this incident, however, was that Aikman was not just a quarterback in his playing days but one who endured many concussions. Yet he was advocating for less overt protection for his former position. Tellingly, Aikman is not alone among former quarterbacks now in the broadcasting field who have been similarly outspoken with regard to the game becoming too soft, with all-time great Tom Brady most prominent among them (though, importantly, he generally does not make such statements on the game broadcasts themselves). 

Still, something very interesting has happened since the Aikman “dresses” episode. Network commentators have almost uniformly ceased to make strong comments condemning the way penalties on defensive players are radically altering the game in a negative direction. Now, the most you are likely to get from a network announcer is a very mild questioning of such a call, followed by a toss to the “rules expert,” who, being a former official, is never going to express anything more incendiary than mild disagreement with even the most outrageous flag, followed by the broadcast team quickly moving on. 

While there is no way to be certain why the TV networks have suddenly taken this profoundly different tack, it is my informed speculation that the NFL made it clear to their broadcast partners, who are more than willing to bend over backward for the content creator keeping them in business, to “knock it off” when it comes to openly criticizing the wussification of their product. You see, without the added juice of a network announcer ripping a preposterous penalty, the clip of such a play no longer has the same potential to go viral on X or TikTok, and, consequently, the NFL can avoid the organized outrage over what is systematically happening to the sport.

This tactic has been extremely effective, allowing the NFL to get away with rule changes that would have caused a massive uproar just a few years ago. For instance, the new kickoff formation, created solely for the purpose of cutting back on high-speed collisions, has been an absolute disaster. Almost every kickoff now results in nothing but another touchback, with men formerly known as special teams warriors now reduced to pathetic eunuchs forced to go through an embarrassing ritual, all so we can pretend that there are still kickoffs in a sport called FOOTball.

Donald Trump ripped this farce during the presidential campaign, though even that failed to spark any legitimate discussion of how ludicrous it all is. Yet, somehow, the network broadcasts never fail to show us the kickoff—once one of the most exciting plays in the game but now the most boring, with hardly a word about how silly the whole charade is or how easily it could be corrected by simply moving the kicker back another five yards. 

It is both interesting and ironic that all of this is happening in a political environment where Trump is now returning to the White House, in large part because many Americans seemed to choose his peculiar brand of masculinity over the feminism of Kamala Harris and the modern Democratic Party. It seems odd that football, a sport once synonymous with manliness, appears to be undergoing a self-induced chemical castration, all while much of its core fan base of mostly non-liberals is simultaneously lashing out politically in some sort of last stand for America to retain at least one of our metaphorical testicles for as long as theoretically possible. 

The masculinity aspect of the current debate over the future of football (one that has intermittently raged since the sport’s inception in the post-Civil War era) is best illustrated by the controversy over so-called “guardian caps.” The controversy bubbling just below the surface of this year’s NFL primary storylines involves the use of what amounts to a kind of bubble wrap for the helmet. The theory is that these incredibly ugly and awkward-looking helmet covers will cut down on concussions by providing extra protection. However, the science behind them is, at best, unsettled—making them a lot like the COVID mask. 

Several players have begun to wear guardian caps in games. Still, despite the sports media’s failed effort to shame Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa—who has suffered multiple concussions—into wearing one, the movement has yet to gain much momentum. If it eventually catches fire, much like the COVID mask did for mostly political reasons, it will mark, at least symbolically, the beginning of the end of tackle football.

To be clear, no one is advocating for football to be riskier for the purpose of quenching some sort of sick blood lust. However, reasonably regulated physicality is an essential part of this formerly great sport, one that has benefits for the development of young men all the way down to the high school level. 

Once this part of the sport finally fades away, there will be no going back. Our society is way too soft now to ever condone a mainstream commercial endeavor (especially one that now openly appeals to ardent Taylor Swift fans) becoming significantly “less safe” on purpose. When this eventually happens, an important piece of what once made America unique will be lost forever.