On Super Bowl Sunday 2011, family and friends back East were hunkered down eating cheese soup and waiting to cheer on the Green Bay Packers.
Here in Sunny SoCal tens of thousands ran in the Surf City USA Marathon so they later *could* eat cheese soup and cheer on the Green Bay Packers.
When the game began we had no idea who would win. What we could anticipate was that there would be a lot of head knocks. Whether on the big boy fields or PeeWee football, the rule used to be that if you got your bell rung you sucked it up and got back out there again.
In the January 31, 2011 issue of The New Yorker magazine there is an in-depth, 10 page article reporting on how violence in the sport of football is coming head-to-head with concussions, traumatic brain injuries, and litigation. The question raised by Ben McGrath in his carefully researched article is also its title, "Does Football Have a Future?" Excerpt.
"The violence of football has always been a matter of concern and the sport has seen periodic attempts at safety and reform. But recent neurological findings have uncovered risks that are more insidious."
Concussions and football seem to go together like chips and salsa or brats and beer. 
McGrath's work begins as a fascinating read into the history and development of a brutal game that has become a national pastime. Excerpt.
"The crisis surrounding football’s brutality at the turn of the twentieth century was so great that it eventually inspired Presidential intervention. Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s present-day spokesman, told me, “You should research Teddy Roosevelt’s involvement in changing the game in 1905.” Roosevelt, whose son was then a freshman football player at Harvard, summoned college coaches to the White House to discuss reforming the sport before public opinion turned too far against it. Eighteen people had died on the field that year. The idea, or hope, was to preserve the game’s essential character-building physicality (“I’ve got no sympathy whatever with the overwrought sentimentality that would keep a young man in cotton-wool,” Roosevelt wrote) without filling up the morgue. The next year, the forward pass was legalized, thereby transforming football from a militarized or corporatized rugby to something more like “contact ballet,” as Oriard calls it."
Professionalization of the sport led to specialization within the sport. Excerpt.
"Introducing the forward pass may have saved the sport from marginalization, or even banishment, but it did not resolve the inherent tension in our secular religion. With increased professionalization, in the middle decades of the last century, came specialization within the sport, and the demise of players who covered both offense and defense. And with specialization came increased speed and intensity, owing, in part, to reduced fatigue among the players, as well as skill sets and body types suited to particular facets of the game. “Savagery on Sunday” was the headline on a Life story in 1955. Walter Cronkite produced a half-hour special, “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” about a New York Giants linebacker who had declared, “We try to hurt everybody.”
Ironically, as the game becomes increasingly violent it becomes safer. Excerpt.
"The increased attention—football was on its way to surpassing baseball as the nation’s favorite spectator sport—brought more reforms, many of them related to equipment: chinstraps, the rubber bar, full-on face masks. “Even as the discussion of the game’s violence was at its shrillest, the sport was becoming safer,” Michael MacCambridge writes in “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation.” But, even as the game was becoming safer, through better equipment and further tweaking of the rules (calling a play dead as soon as a knee touched down, say, to limit bone-crunching pileups), it was evolving in such a way that it also became more dangerous, as players, comfortably protected by their face masks, learned to tackle with their heads instead of with their arms and shoulders. When Michael Oriard played for the Chiefs, in the early nineteen-seventies, he weighed two hundred and forty pounds; his counterpart on today’s Chiefs roster weighs about three hundred and ten, and is probably no slower. Players didn’t obsessively lift weights in Oriard’s day."
So what is the NFL worried about? 
How has a game come to this? Is it the game? Is it the players? Is it the public? Is it the equipment? And who is minding the NFL store? Excerpt.
"Credit for the public’s increased awareness of these issues must go to the Times, and to its reporter Alan Schwarz, whom Dr. Joseph Maroon, the Steelers’ neurosurgeon and a longtime medical adviser to the league, calls “the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix.” Schwarz was a career baseball writer, with a heavy interest in statistics, when, in December of 2006, he got a call from a friend of a friend named Chris Nowinski, a Harvard football player turned pro wrestler turned concussion activist. Andre Waters, the former Philadelphia Eagles safety, had just committed suicide, and Nowinski was in possession of his mottled brain. The earliest cases of C.T.E. had been medical news, not national news. Nowinski’s journalist contacts, as he recalls, were in “pro-wrestling media, not legitimate media.” He needed help."
What has Schwartz' reporting brought to the forefront? Excerpt.
"What we now know, from reading Schwarz, is that retired N.F.L. players are five to nineteen times as likely as the general population to have received a dementia-related diagnosis; that the helmet-manufacturing industry is overseen by a volunteer consortium funded largely by helmet manufacturers; and that Lou Gehrig may not actually have had the disease that bears his name but suffered from concussion-related trauma instead. (Since 1960, fourteen N.F.L. players have had a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is about twelve more than you would expect from a random population sample.) In the manner of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Dr. Maroon has delineated four stages in the N.F.L.’s reaction to the reality of brain damage: active resistance and passive resistance, shifting to passive acceptance and, finally, in the past few months, active acceptance. “What we’re seeing now is that major cultural shift, and I think Alan took a lot of barbs, and a lot of hits, initially, for his observations,” Maroon said."
There is a robust debate over how football should be played and who is at fault when players are injured. Do we demand too much - or do we demand too little of league executives, equipment manufacturers, or technology? Should adults just be able to decide for themselves what they will do and how they will do it? Perhaps the fate of football will be left in the hands of the lawyers and insurance executives. Excerpt.
"As for football’s fate, “I don’t think it’ll be driven by public opinion, but by lawyers and insurance companies,” David Meggyesy, who played linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals in the nineteen-sixties, told me. Meggyesy was put off by the sport’s cultural overlap with American imperialism, as he saw it, and wrote a book, “Out of Their League,” that served as football’s “Ball Four”: a startling exposé that reads, a generation later, as largely unsurprising. He wrote, “When society changes the way I hope it will, football will be obsolete.” He also mentioned to me in an e-mail, not long ago, that he had reacted with “big pride” when his rugby-playing daughter confessed to him, “You know, Dad, I really love to hit.” The tension is within us all. But with new medical evidence may come new legal risk and liability, and recalibrated insurance premiums, for schools as well as for individuals. “Football may go the way of gymnastics, where these private entities will come forward and have teams,” Meggyesy said, envisioning a scenario in which the social pecking order at American high schools is not driven by quarterbacks and their doting cheerleaders."
"What did they know and when did they know it?" is not just a line from Watergate. Lawsuits are in the works. Excerpt.
“There’s a potential lawsuit out there that’s devastating,” the Steelers Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said on Fox’s pregame show, the weekend after James Harrison threatened retirement. I know of two groups of lawyers preparing class-action suits, on behalf of recent players, against the N.F.L., with an eye toward filing in the first six months of this year. At issue is what the league knew and when, and, ultimately, what responsibility it has to its players, with a likely focus on the difference between two documents that were distributed in locker rooms as safety guidelines. The first, a pamphlet written in 2007, left open the question of whether “there are any long-term effects of concussion in N.F.L. athletes,” while the second, a poster that was introduced before the start of this season, mentioned that “concussions and conditions resulting from repeated brain injury can change your life and your family’s life forever.” Trial lawyers, tort reform, the nanny state: this is no small part of football’s future."
Play ball. 
