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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Today's youth and amateur level competitors are tomorrow's professionals. I think there's a decent chance that in 50 years, American football will no longer be America's dominant sport simply because the player base may dry up. And I'm okay with that. I think it's telling when former NFL players discourage their own kids from playing football.

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It will?

As long as there are poor people with some athletic ability and fans willing to watch them, there will be grid iron football players.

Sure but boxing gives us a historical precedent. Boxing used to be the professional sport. It was also a sport that many youth across all spectrums of society participated in.

Today it is confined to a niche professionally and is almost totally absent from most youth sport systems.

But isn't part of that the perceived corruption in boxing? MMA has stepped in and there are youth MMA "academies" all over the place.

I know MMA fans might take exception but I think I'd lump them in with boxing fans of the past. Maybe there is some clear delimiter between MMA fans and boxing fan of the past; I can't think what it would be though.

Well one of the pitches of MMA is that its safer than boxing, especially in its modern incarnations and particularly when it comes to repeated head trauma.

Lots of the kids MMA events don't even allow head strikes and especially not the particularly dangerous elbow strikes while on the ground.

Boxing makes it hard to have that distinction. My prediction is that MMA will also go through this when people start realizing that the head trauma stuff is nearly as bad in MMA as boxing.

I did not say it will; I said it might. And the existence of people willing to play does not guarantee the surrounding market and culture necessary to make a sport the dominant sport in the US. I think that depends a lot on that sport's pervasiveness in our culture, and in particular in high schools and colleges which are effectively our professional feeder system. If less players start going into youth football, and then less players are going into high school and college football, I think less people in our culture will pay attention, decreasing its market size and culture significance. Again, I'm not saying this will happen. I'm saying it might.

A strong component of what's perceived as traditional American subculture is broadly inflexible, even in the face of glaring evidence. You might be right, but then again, we've been surprised before by the persistence of this sort of cultural undertow, no?

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