Former NFL receiver Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing football

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Chromatic

It absolutely won't. I'm seeing more and more people saying they won't let their kids play football than ever before. The people I hear saying that seems to double every year.

They'll have to change since the participation and talent pool is already starting to decline.

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/...-causal-factor

That's really interesting.

The NFL has massive money and influence, but I'm not sure what they can do about parental decisions at the peewee level.

There'll always be people who play. The game is fun. But it looks like the talent pool may decline over time. It'll be an interesting battle between smaller talent pools and ever-improving training and nutrition to see how the NFL product changes over time.

I want to conclude that a smaller talent pool could be the NFL's demise, but I don't think it will be. I don't know that we as viewers would be able to discern the impacts of a smaller talent pool. It seems like the only way to kill the league would be a regulatory ban, but you'd have not just the NFL fighting that, but every Division I college. I don't think you can kill it via regulation, either.

So can the NFL be killed? Maybe not. Maybe the long-term fate is that interest fades since fewer people grow up playing the sport, and it declines back into the pack of other sports as opposed to being the 600-lb. gorilla. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but then it would make the league more vulnerable to being killed by internal issues such as the concussion lawsuit.