John Kass, Chicago Tribune: ‘Football Is As Dead as the Marlboro Man’
Are the University of Utah and the Arizona Prosecutor Running Out the Clock on Greg Winslow Scandals?
April 23, 2013Utah Mailbag: ‘What Was Hope a Month Ago Is Turning to Despair’
April 24, 2013http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0424-20130424,0,5660156.column
Money quote:
[I]t’s not the lawyers who are the death of football. Blaming lawyers misses the point. Like their counterparts in nature, lawyers are merely the cleanup crew. What finishes football are the parents of future football players.
The NFL desperately needs American parents. Not as fans, but as suppliers of young flesh.
The NFL needs parents to send their little boys into the football feeder system. And without that supply of meat for the NFL grinder — first youth teams, then high school and college — there can be no professional football.
And yet every day, more American parents decide they’re finished with football. Why? Because parents can no longer avoid the fact that football scrambles the human brain.
In cultural terms, parents who send their 10-year-olds to play football might as well hold up signs saying they’d like to give their children cigarettes and whiskey.