The thing for me is, I never watched it for the contact. Its always been a rooting interest type of sport and if I wanted contact I'd go watch boxing or MMA.

The thing they don't seem to get(The NFL) is that most people don't care about the hits and they could eliminate them. I'd watch highly skilled athletes from my university or city play FLAG FOOTBALL at the highest levels of skill and athleticism as often or more often than I watch them now.

We need to think a bit about why people watch team sport as a society and realize that if flag football was the highest level we'd ever known we probably wouldn't lose a viewer.

Skills are skills and team rivalries and rooting interests remain regardless of whether its hockey or football or whatever.