Sorry this column is a little late this month… instead of writing, I was watching the Browns somehow pull off a miracle against the Ravens. #whyamiabrownsfan
Anyway, my prediction this month is that the sport that now fills my fall weekends will look very different twenty years from now.
First, football is joining baseball, basketball and other sports that are tracking players and capturing petabytes of real-time data. Football players have started wearing RFID chips on their shoulder pads. Australian football players already wear similar sorts of GPS devices, which track their movements and activities during a game, so now the NFL is catching up to the rest of the sports world. These sensors will bring Moneyball-style metrics to the NFL, having an impact that we have seen in these other sports, which will mean new kinds of tactics and strategies, to say nothing of new ways to evaluate player performance.
An even bigger impact from sensor technology will come to fantasy football. The new types of statistics will be a boon to that growing market. Wannabe GMs will have deeper and more sophisticated kinds of data at their disposal to build their teams, enhancing their experience.
I would also anticipate (or, rather, I would hope) that the NFL will use data-collecting tools to monitor, predict and prevent concussions, one of the biggest challenges facing football today. If sensors can capture data from every play and every action on the field, I would anticipate that researchers would be able to identify the circumstances under which the most serious concussions occur. These data analytics may reveal, for example, that most concussions occur when two players meet head-on when the ball is swept wide or when a receiver crosses over the middle and hit by the free safety. Identifying such patterns might lead to rule changes that would regulate these kinds of player movements to the point that these occurrences would be less likely to happen.
For the NFL (and football in general) has to do something about its concussion problem. Just because the league has settled with former players who sued over the long term health effects of concussions while playing the sport does not mean that the problem has gone away. As players grow larger and faster, the rate and intensity of concussions expands by the minute.
A growing concussion problem may affect the long term viability of the sport. It is possible that the NFL will be forced — by an act of Congress or some other regulator — to change rules such that concussions are minimized. Some have seriously suggested that helmets be removed from the game, meaning that players would go into tackles more cautiously if they stopped using their heads as weapons. If an act of Congress seems an unlikely prospect, consider that over a century ago Congress seriously considered a ban on college football when a number of student-athletes were killed playing the sport (only intercession by Teddy Roosevelt kept this from happening). It is possible that as the concussion problem grows that there will be those that act if the NFL does not.
But another scenario is that the demand for football might wane as people grow uneasy about supporting such a “barbaric” sport (in the way some Spaniards are rethinking their allegiance to bullfighting.) If the brutality of concussions doesn’t drive fans away, the continued criminal behavior and sexual assaults of NFL players just might. Perhaps potential fans will be drawn to other kinds of spectator activity rather than giving their tacit endorsement of the NFL.
The rise of eSports might signal the beginning of such a turn. For those unacquainted, eSports are video game competitions watched (and even bet upon) by spectators. One such eSport, League of Legends, drew a crowd of around 10,000 last year in Wembley Arena for a championship match. Robert Morris University has offered scholarships to League of Legend players meaning that these eSports players are considered athletes by the University. It is not far of stretch to see today’s young people retaining their allegiance to eSports. As they grow older, these spectators might gravitate toward supporting virtual teams in Madden NFL (minus the concussions and other threats to life and limb to real athletes) rather than the actual NFL. Columbus was once the home of one of the original NFL franchises. Today, Columbus is home to the only Major League Gaming arena outside of New York. Major League Gaming is relatively small today and off many people’s radar, but so was the NFL in the 1920s and 1930s.
If the idea of pro football waning in popularity seems implausible, consider the declining sales and cultural relevance of McDonalds for evidence of a once-dominant brand that is now quickly sliding into insignificance. The NFL over the next twenty years could see its popularity decline such that it becomes a niche sport watched by only a handful of devoted fans… like me.
David Staley is president of Columbus Futurists and an associate professor of history and design at The Ohio State University.
The next Columbus Futurists monthly forum will be Thursday, October 22, 2015 from 7:30pm to 9:00pm at the Whetstone Library Community Room(note the room and time change). Our topic for the evening will be “Devouring the Earth: How British Food Changed the World.”