Features

The Fight Over the Future of Football Has Become a Battle for California’s Soul

California has long been known as a hotbed of football talent. Yet as research into the game’s dangers has spread, politicians, advocates, and parents have clashed over how to protect youth, high school, and college athletes. What happens to a state intractably divided by sport?

Features

The Fight Over the Future of Football Has Become a Battle for California’s Soul

California has long been known as a hotbed of football talent. Yet as research into the game’s dangers has spread, politicians, advocates, and parents have clashed over how to protect youth, high school, and college athletes. What happens to a state intractably divided by sport?

By Michael WeinrebJan. 22, 2019, 2:08 pm UTC • 21 min

I. The Coach

On a brilliant October afternoon in San Francisco, a high school football coach named Danny Chan watched as his varsity offense ran sets against a phantom defense composed of a couple players brandishing tackling dummies. “We’re a fringe program,” said Chan, the head coach at Lowell High, which is widely viewed as the most academically rigorous public secondary school in the city. The visuals from that day backed Chan’s contention: Gatorade bottles were stacked haphazardly in a shopping cart used to transport them to the practice field, and the varsity players took turns in the compact shed that serves as a weight room.

While the members of Lowell’s freshman-sophomore team practiced at one end of the field, Chan coached the smaller cluster of varsity players at the other. Altogether, Lowell’s varsity roster numbered 18 players, including a pair of girls, which meant offensive reps against a full defense were a luxury he could no longer afford. This shabby survivalist approach has been the reality at Lowell for decades, ever since Chan himself played football here in the late 1980s. Sometimes when Chan meets Lowell alumni and tells them he’s the school’s varsity football coach, they seem surprised that their alma mater even has a football team.

To comprehend the slow but unmistakable erosion of football in California, it’s best to begin on the periphery, in the places where the impact is already being felt—places like Lowell, where last fall brought one of the toughest seasons yet. “This might be the worst year,” Chan predicted to a school newspaper reporter back in August, and it never got much better. All season, Lowell—which has a student body of more than 2,500—struggled to suit up the 18 healthy players required by the city to compete. The Cardinals won a single game, against a crosstown rival that was also struggling with its roster numbers, and the school’s principal forfeited their season finale against undefeated Lincoln High, citing safety concerns. (At the two Lowell games I attended, the cheerleaders outnumbered the football players.) The program is getting harder and harder to sustain, Chan tells me, and though there are many reasons why, he says they all circle back to one central theme: Chan feels like he’s competing not just against his own hard realities. He also feels like he’s competing against the increasingly negative public perception of the sport itself.

Chan works outside of Lowell as a private-school educator, and considers his program largely autonomous. He’s expected to operate with a limited headcount and sparse resources, so to have any hope of keeping up with traditional city powers like Lincoln (where Mike Holmgren was once both a player and coach) and Galileo (which once produced a transcendent running back named Orenthal James Simpson), he’s installed a rush-heavy offense straight out of the 1920s. The kids he gets, he says, are the “crazy and nutty ones” who aren’t afraid of taking on a near-insurmountable challenge. “I know at other schools, football is ‘the thing,’” Chan says. “Not here.”

The son of immigrants, Chan was once one of those crazy and nutty kids. Football, for him, provided a path toward assimilation. It was a quintessentially American pursuit, a sport that required sacrifice and teamwork, even if his parents didn’t fully understand its importance. But now, he says, fear has overtaken opportunity, particularly among parents who, amid a flood of headlines about brain injuries and CTE, seem especially reluctant to allow their children to play football. In 2017, Chan had a star running back who played in that fall’s first game, then said his mom didn’t want him playing football anymore. Just like that, he was gone.

Upon hearing this, I ask Chan the question that has become a kind of political litmus test in the United States, but particularly in the most progressive state in the union, a place that has historically been one of the most fertile producers of football talent.

I ask him whether he thinks football is under attack.

“Yes,” Chan says. “It’s totally under attack. And it’s under attack because [of] biases of what football [is].”  

II. The Numbers

You can find stories like Chan’s in nearly every state, as football’s place at the center of the American experience is being openly questioned. Over the past decade, high school football participation has dropped 6.6 percent nationwide, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). Much of that decline can be attributed to the violent nature of the sport, and the attention being paid to the repercussions of that violence.

The headlines made by Boston University CTE studies, Will Smith movies, and the 2012 suicide of Hall of Famer Junior Seau have intensified arguments and sowed political division about the future of football. On one side are those who say that the sport—particularly at the youth and high school levels—is inherently dangerous and deserves careful regulation, if not an outright ban. On the other are those who say this is yet another example of government overreach that represents the softening (and imminent downfall) of America. And nowhere have those politics been on starker display than in California, which has continued to produce many of the country’s best high school football players, even as it’s transformed into the bluest state of them all.

It’s not surprising that the three most populous states—California, Florida, and Texas—also traditionally churn out the highest numbers of college and professional football players. What’s intriguing is how each state’s football culture has been shaped by its overarching systems: Texas is defined by its sheer scale of talent, Florida has become the default repository for speed, and California has become an incubator for quarterbacks in progressive offenses.

And while Texas and Florida have also wrestled with decreasing participation in high school football, the numbers don’t tell quite the same story as they do in California. California had 104,224 high school football players at 1,029 schools during the 2009-10 season, according to NFHS. By 2017-18, those numbers had dropped to 94,286 players at 877 schools. Since 2015, the number of players in California has fallen by about 3 percent each year. Over that same time period, the number of participants and football-playing schools in Florida and Texas—both far redder states on the political map—have more or less held steady.

North of San Francisco, in Marin County—where Rams quarterback Jared Goff grew up—Novato High School went winless in both 2017 and 2018. Novato isn’t a “fringe program” like Lowell; it’s produced four NFL players in its six-decade history. Up in wine country, Healdsburg High dropped its team this season. Even in Southern California, a traditional recruiting hotbed, once-powerful programs are struggling to piece teams together. There is a startling consistency to the narrative: Roger Blake, executive director of the California Interscholastic Federation, tells me that schools all over the state are facing these issues, regardless of demographics. It’s happening in urban areas like San Francisco and San Diego, and it’s happening in rural outposts far from the major cities. It’s happening even as California’s overall participation rates for high school sports have reached all-time highs, as participation in boys’ soccer has grown by roughly 19 percent over the last 10 years. The question now is whether there’s any hope for a football revival, or whether this is simply the new normal.

It’s too early to see an impact of those diminishing numbers on college recruiting or at the professional level, because the bottleneck from high school to college to the NFL is so narrow, says Roger Pielke Jr., head of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado. There are still more than a million kids playing high school football nationwide. But Pielke’s research has revealed that America’s moment of “peak football” appears to be firmly in the past. The average high school football team has lost a total of three players since 2016 alone, and if that kind of attrition continues, it could serve as a tipping point for schools (both high schools and colleges) that either have small enrollments or place less of an institutional emphasis on football.

And while football advocates like to point out that the sport is safer than ever before, the underlying concern remains: How safe can it ever truly be? Since 2010, there have been between 12 and 18 on- and off-field football-related deaths each year at the youth, high school, and college levels, according to research by the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury; those deaths are now being reported on and scrutinized more closely than ever. Combine those headlines with the long-term concerns about how football’s concussive violence might affect a young person’s brain, and it leads to an overarching sense of fear that inherently dovetails with the nature of the sport itself. As that fear spreads, and studies like the recent one led by Berkeley researchers continue to suggest that there are brain-altering dangers associated with football, social scientists like Pielke have raised larger, more existential questions. Will football soon become further divided by culture, region, and social class? Is its very existence now an intractable political wedge issue?

And is it possible that, at some critical juncture, an unabashedly progressive state like California will effectively legislate tackle football out of existence?

III. The Activists

In February 2018, a pair of California state legislators introduced a bill that proposed a ban on tackling in youth football for kids younger than 12. Both of those legislators happened to be Democrats, which an activist for youth-sports safety named Kimberly Archie immediately realized would reinforce the existing political perceptions surrounding this issue. Namely, it would make it seem like there can be no middle ground: Either you believe in the sanctity of football, or you’re a radical liberal seeking to destroy it.

The funny thing, Archie says, is that she once campaigned for Sonny Bono when he ran for House of Representatives as a California Republican in the 1990s, and she was president of the Young Republicans when she was in college. (Her nickname, she says, was “Mrs. Limbaugh.”) Archie grew up as a cheerleader in Red Bluff, California, a rural and conservative town of roughly 14,000 people where football held an important place, like it does in many small communities across the United States. “Football was a big part of our town and how people viewed how other people were,” she says. “Football people were different than other people who were not jocks.”

By the time the bill was introduced, though, Archie was viewed as an enemy by many of the same people whose politics she once embraced. She has long been an advocate for safety in youth sports, and worked as a consultant on a legal case about NFL head injuries. But it wasn’t until the months after her son, Paul Bright Jr., died in a motorcycle accident in 2014 that she began to zero in on youth football. Bright was 24 years old at the time, and Archie says he had been exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior for a few years prior. Eventually, a study of his brain at Boston University revealed that he had early-stage CTE, which Archie believes developed when he played youth football from age 7 to 15. She’s spent years advocating that children should have rights to basic safety measures; in her mind, the ideal solution would be for them to play flag football up to the age of 14.

But people see her these days—a hard-driving advocate with a legal background who cofounded an awareness group called Faces of CTE; a woman who’s been compared to Erin Brockovich and who, along with a group of moms, is suing Pop Warner over negligence and fraud—and they make assumptions. The first is that she wants to abolish football as an American institution. The second is that anyone who hates football as much as she does must be a bleeding-heart liberal. “Now all of a sudden I’m a liberal because I have common sense and I look at science?” she says. “Has our country gone into the gutter so far that you can troll grieving parents and it’s OK? ... How could a topic about child safety become political?”

And yet it has. After California legislators Kevin McCarty and Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher introduced Assembly Bill 2108, known as the “Safe Youth Football Act,” the tension only ratcheted up. The bill proposed several safety measures for youth football, and the most controversial among them was the ban on tackling for players under 12 years old. To a certain contingent of youth football coaches and parents, that measure felt like another example of the government overreach and out-of-control regulation they were tired of seeing in California. Soon after the bill was announced, a Pop Warner official in Southern California called Chris Fore, a longtime high school football coach from the town of Apple Valley, and the next day Fore set up the Twitter account @savecafootball. The account galvanized a lobbying effort and led to the creation of a Facebook group where parents could share stories and vent, often with a blatantly political tilt.

“I don’t think it’s a party-line issue,” says Steve Famiano, a youth football administrator in Apple Valley and one of the moderators of the Facebook group. “But some people would like to make it out be that.”

McCarty pulled the bill within a couple of months, before it was ever brought for a vote. This didn’t surprise Archie, who says she had nothing to do with the drafting of McCarty’s bill, despite some Save Youth Football members attempting to prove otherwise. Archie initially supported the bill, though she says she told McCarty after he introduced it that he was going to “get eaten alive by those football guys” and that “the NFL and the football industry have been controlling the narrative for a hundred plus years.” Archie says McCarty responded by telling her to “stick to being a grieving mom.” Eventually, Archie’s organization withdrew its support of the bill, saying that its message and strategy were confusing. (McCarty did not respond to a message to his office seeking comment.)

The Save Youth Football movement celebrated the pulling of the bill; many of them believed they’d rescued the sport from the slippery slope of government impingement on individual rights. On the day the bill was pulled, one Save Youth Football member, Joe Rafter, filmed a video from New Jersey in which he teared up as New York’s One World Trade Center loomed in the background. And then Rafter and others, presuming that McCarty’s bill was only an opening salvo, immediately began to steel themselves for the next fight.

“I don’t wrap my kids in bubble wrap,” says Rafter, a businessman who got involved with the Save Youth Football movement soon after McCarty introduced his bill. Rafter lives in Marin County, played football at Division III Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and got involved with the local youth football scene, he tells me, because he wanted his sons to have the same opportunities that he did. While he comes across as anything but an anti-science zealot, something triggered him when he heard about the youth tackle football ban; for Rafter, football symbolized all the lessons about teamwork and overcoming fear that he took into his career as an adviser to business leaders. Beyond that, it became an issue of parental rights: If he wanted his kids to play tackle football, and the kids themselves wanted to play tackle football, why should the government have a right to stop them?

“California is the most liberal state in the country,” Rafter says. “San Francisco is the most liberal city in the most liberal state. And generally, the people who play football play it because they want to. They want that for their sons. … Some people accept the risk that life offers. Some people choose to manage that risk in different ways. … I want to raise my kids to face into the risks. But I guess to some people, that makes me a Neanderthal.”

As we sit at a table outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, Rafter seems to be choosing his words carefully. But for him, this is an emotional issue. Football is a “character-development tool,” he says, and the violence inherent to the sport is part of that development. Flag football is fine, Rafter tells me. He just sees flag football and tackle football as two completely different sports and believes that by banning youth tackle football, you’re banning football as we know it. At one point during our conversation, he refers to activists like Archie as “the anti-football mafia.” When I repeat the phrase back to him, he apologizes and says, “That’s the first time I’ve ever used that term.”

Rafter says he’s open to certain safety compromises—limiting tackling time in youth practices, for instance, something that’s part of a proposed new bill his current organization has sponsored. He’s not ignorant of the science; he just contends that it’s in its nascent stages, that certain studies may be flawed or inaccurate, and that there’s not enough evidence to implement a full tackling ban at the youth level. He says that activists like Archie are instilling a public panic and have no interest in compromise, and that their comparisons between letting children play football and exposing them to lead paint or cigarette smoke are based largely on fearmongering. Football, Rafter says, is already safer than it was when he played a generation ago.

“That’s total bullshit,” Archie tells me over the phone. “So it went from a level 10 to a level 9?”

For Archie, the issue is simple—why should parents be allowed to take risks with their children’s lives, even if the science is still progressing? If those parents get their way and end up being wrong, she says, another generation of kids could be subjected to traumatic brain injury. If she gets her way and ends up being wrong, she says, where’s the harm?

“It’s like if we don’t have football in every hometown, we’re going to become something we don’t want to be,” she says. “And I’m not against football existing. But why would parents play Russian roulette with their kids’ brains? Maybe they need to ask themselves, ‘Why is a 9-year-old bashing heads so important to me?’

“Football is important because we made it important. If we made soccer the center of the universe, then it would be the center of the universe.”

And this, too, is essentially an echo of California’s own history.

IV. The History

In 1906, as the powers that governed college football—along with president Theodore Roosevelt—sought to stem a crisis of violence that culminated in the death of Union College player Harold Moore, a pair of Northern California universities dropped the sport and replaced it with something else. For nearly a decade, Cal and Stanford attempted to make rugby the centerpiece of their athletic programs. Benjamin Ide Wheeler, the president at Cal, declared that “football must be made over or go.” Football was too commercial, too violent, too antithetical to the college’s mission, according to Wheeler and his Stanford counterpart, David Starr Jordan; rugby, they felt, would be both safer and a better representative of the moral values they hoped to impart both to their students and young people throughout California. They reached out to other California schools in hopes that they would do the same. To an extent, it worked: USC dropped football after the 1910 season. Soon after, a number of high schools followed suit, and the decision had a major impact statewide.

For the most part, the rest of the country either ridiculed or ignored California’s intransigence. A few nearby colleges, including St. Mary’s College, the University of Santa Clara, and the University of Nevada, also switched to rugby, but the spiritual center of both football and academia was still located in the East. Advocates of football referred to rugby as a “pink tea party,” criticizing the lack of aggressive tackling and saying that it wasn’t fit for “real men.” Daily newspapers ran cartoons that derided rugby as an effeminate sport. The prohibition lasted for more than a decade, and along the way, something interesting happened. According to author Roberta J. Park, the American version of rugby eventually took on many of what Wheeler viewed as “the objectional features of football,” including a reliance on bulk and tackling over speed and skillful ballhandling.

On November 22, 1919, in the wake of rules changes that had largely altered the public perception of the sport, Stanford and Cal faced each other in a football game for the first time since 1905. Something about the sport proved so central to the American ethos—and the California ethos, as part of a state that prides itself on constant reinvention—that it simply wouldn’t go away. More than a century later, on some of the most progressive college campuses in California, that still appears to be the case.

The funny thing is that Nadav Goldschmied felt that same powerful connection to American football when he emigrated from Israel to the United States in 1998 to get an advanced degree in psychology. “I thought football was the best game ever,” he tells me. “I have a basketball background, and to me, this was like basketball on steroids.”

Goldschmied got his PhD at South Florida, wrote about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Super Bowl team for an Israeli newspaper, and then wound up as a professor at the University of San Diego in 2011. One day, while watching a show about NFL collisions with his wife’s sister, who was a nurse, Goldschmied saw her grimace. He began to wonder whether he’d neglected the sport’s hidden costs. He thought about it more after his son was born eight years ago. Over the years, as he read more about CTE, he realized there was no way he’d ever let his son play, even if he desperately wanted to. Why, he began to wonder, should anybody be allowed?

And so roughly a year ago, Goldschmied teamed with a pair of colleagues—one a history professor, the other a physics professor—and introduced a resolution to ban USD’s football program. The resolution was nonbinding, meaning the effect would have largely been symbolic and required several more steps to have any impact. But at a school that regularly competes for conference championships in the FCS (and that kick-started Jim Harbaugh’s head-coaching career in 2004), that symbolism might have garnered the kind of attention that Goldschmied hoped would at least begin a protracted conversation. Instead, the faculty voted it down, 50-26, with 30 abstentions. And there seems to be no will to prolong the discussion any further.

This is the part that boggles Goldschmied’s mind: Why, he says, shouldn’t this conversation be had at institutions of higher learning? Why shouldn’t schools like USD be leading the way? And why aren’t the faculty members at any other schools, either inside or outside of California, asking the same questions?

The answer may be as simple as tracing the bottom line: For major colleges, football is a moneymaking enterprise, and for smaller schools like USD, it’s a powerful recruiting and public-relations tool. Even at certain high schools, football has become a lucrative product. But just as Harvard president Charles Eliot continually (and futilely) denounced football more than a century ago, Goldschmied now finds himself wondering when the academics within the university system will muster the courage to question how an increasingly troublesome sport comports with its larger educational mission. “I’m appalled that there’s no more efforts done just like the one we did,” Goldschmied tells me. “It’s astonishing to me that people who are educated in the sciences, who can read an empirical investigation with all its disadvantages and are able to assess it proficiently, would not take it to the next step and at least make the effort to bring about change.”

Maybe, Goldschmied wonders aloud, his efforts came too soon. Maybe it will take a seismic event, like the death of Harold Moore in 1905, to cut through the politics, even in a state like California. (The last gubernatorial candidate to propose a decreased emphasis on football in California was LSD pioneer and ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary, who, when announcing his candidacy in 1969, called football a “speed and booze game,” and advocated for baseball as “a gentle marijuana game.” He was sentenced to prison for drug possession soon after.) Before he died, Kimberly Archie’s son had caught on with her cause to make youth sports safer and told her she might have to wait until a parent who was wealthy or politically powerful lost their own son.

“Mom,” she says he told her, “wait till the wrong kid dies.”

V. The Future

For now, the political divide over football persists in California, particularly on the over 5,500-member Save Youth Football message board. There, the most extreme advocates often post about what they view as the degradation of the game, spearheaded by left-leaning politicians like Kevin McCarty or activists like Kim Archie and fueled by what they label as “pseudo-science.” Along with several other leaders of Save Youth Football, Rafter’s new organization, the California Youth Football Alliance (CAYFA), seems to be staking out more moderate ground. A CAYFA-proposed bill to limit the amount of contact time in practice for youth football leagues statewide is sponsored by a Democratic politician. Whether those incremental steps will gain any traction is yet to be seen; both Rafter and Archie implied that there may be no way to conduct a reasonable dialogue about an issue that has become so blatantly politicized.

“Much like many things in our society right now,” Rafter says, “everyone’s getting entrenched in their position and vilifying the other side.”

“We’re putting ourselves out there and being a whipping post for the crazies out there,” Archie says, “all the zealots who think you’ve gotta play football to make America great again, or we’re all going to wither away and die and not be able to send our men off to war and that China will take over America.”

So what will happen next? It’s possible that flag football will eventually displace tackle football among youth, and the numbers will go back up as we come to terms with the risks involved for those in high school and beyond; in fact, the case for youth flag football is increasingly being made by coaches and NFL veterans like John Madden and Drew Brees, who has said he won’t allow his own children to play tackle football until middle school. But without knowing how science might advance, or whether equipment might evolve, it’s also possible to imagine football becoming an increasingly regional sport that’s centered even more in the Southeast and is slowly de-emphasized on the West Coast. Within the past three years, Georgia has nearly overtaken California as the third-largest college football recruiting state in the country.

It’s easy to imagine football being played primarily by wealthy private schools or well-subsidized public schools that can afford to invest in the most expensive safety measures (and weather the changes in the insurance market), or by athletes from underprivileged communities who are seeking a way out. A school like Lowell, for instance, doesn’t need football to survive.

On the practice field, Danny Chan tells me that one of his best players sat out most of the year while in concussion protocol, citing this as proof that things aren’t the same as they used to be when all those 1960s and ’70s-era NFL players—whose brains wound up at Boston University—were in their prime. When that parent of his star running back pulled her child from football in 2017, Chan questioned why she didn’t lobby the city’s public schools to ban the sport altogether. Or do you only care about your own kid? he asked her.

This is the crux of the philosophical disagreement, one that bleeds into our modern political debate about paternalistic government overreach and the perceived existence of the “nanny state.” During my conversation with Archie, she points to car seats for children as an example of how our safety standards have evolved over time. And during my conversation with Rafter, he brings up car seats as a way of pointing out that we’ve adapted to modern standards without outlawing driving altogether.  So whose responsibility is it to mitigate that risk, and how far should we go in mandating these safety measures? And what do we lose in making these choices?

“Football, in particular, offers communities things of value,” Rafter says. “It’s hard to measure, except through stories and testimonials. I can’t put it in a medical or scientific document. Nobody’s allowing us to have that conversation. But that’s a piece that would be a huge loss, in the worst-case scenario, in the state of California.”

The question, then, is whether you believe that those stories and testimonials depend on the existence of football, or that you feel they’re merely an echo of the communities themselves. Maybe football will someday reinvent itself in a progressive manner, the way it did at the turn of the 20th century. Maybe our cultural and scientific progress as a society means that we should eventually leave it behind. All those years ago, when Stanford and Cal dropped football in favor of rugby, Roberta J. Park wrote that the school’s presidents presumed they were promoting a safer game. But Park also made another, more curious observation: The games we play don’t really influence our morality. They just reflect who we are.

Michael Weinreb