How Many More Years Does Tackle Football Have Left?

By Jacob Weindling | August 18, 2025 | 12:46pm

Photo by Todd Kirkland/Getty Images

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How Many More Years Does Tackle Football Have Left?

Football across the pond kicked off this weekend, marking a wonderous time in the sports calendar that heralds a new season in the American version just around the corner. The NFL preseason is nearly over, and a little over two weeks from now, the Philadelphia Eagles will begin their Super Bowl defense at home against the hapless Dallas Cowboys, the 21st century’s answer to “what if the Cleveland Browns had a better marketing department?” Football fans everywhere are gearing up for another season of this country’s favored brain-damage adjacent activity just as KFF and ESPN released a survey on Friday which calls into question how much longer we will have football as we know it.

According to this survey of NFL players from the 1988 season, 96 percent reported having pain in the last three months, with half saying they feel pain every day, compared to just 23 percent of men their age. “They also reported rates of cognitive decline three times higher than that of men their age, with 55 percent saying they had confusion or memory loss that’s happening more often or getting worse,” wrote KFF and ESPN. While just four percent of men aged 65 and older have been diagnosed with dementia, fifteen percent of these players said they were. This era that is defined by hard-nosed men making routine hits that are now banned from the sport contains a sizeable 26 percent who believe that youth tackle football should be outlawed altogether.

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Despite all these costs they continue to pay to this day, 78 percent of 1988 NFL players said they would still do it all over again knowing what they know now. This echoes what many modern NFL players like Richard Sherman have said, and it gets to the heart of the contradiction in American football. This is our nation’s pastime in the 21st century. It is an intrinsic part of the culture. In many ways, the NFL embodies the contradictions of who we are as Americans, and it’s a group of people knowingly taking part in something we all acknowledge is damaging to society, but still finding community around it.

To be clear, I am pointing the finger at myself first before anyone else. I was raised in Denver where we treat the Broncos like a civic religion, and I hardened my senses as a young football fan shivering in the stands at Folsom Field in Boulder, before growing up and attending CU right as Deion Sanders took the college football world by storm and forced everyone to apologize to both him and me. Growing up and watching Steve Atwater make Christian Okoye look like a bug coming into contact with a windshield while annihilating every poor soul who came over the middle made it pretty hard to avoid the barbarity intrinsic to football. But admittedly, I also really loved those ESPN Jacked Up segments, some of which don’t look so great in hindsight (the final John Lynch helmet-to-helmet hit in that Jacked Up segment is a 15-yard penalty and almost certainly an ejection today).

Last week, the Detroit Lions’ preseason game against the Atlanta Falcons ended early after Lions safety Morice Norris was taken off in an ambulance, and this weekend, two players were hospitalized after meaningless games and practices. Carolina Panthers rookie Nic Scourton suffered a collapsed lung during a joint practice session with the Houston Texans, and the Chargers’ Quentin Johnston was hospitalized with a concussion after being on the receiving end of a hard hit that would have looked right at home in any 1990s or 2000s era Jacked Up segment. This is the tip of the iceberg of the NFL’s war of attrition that will unfold over the coming months.

America’s addiction to a sport we all know is extremely dangerous to people’s brains, especially kids’, raises a simple question: how much longer can we do this? How much longer can fans like me and millions of others who know these players are willingly harming themselves for our entertainment see this as entertaining? How much longer can the players look at a lifetime of pain as a justifiable tradeoff for their glory years in the NFL? How much longer will youth tackle football exist? It certainly won’t happen this year, but the NFL is clearly preparing for when that day comes.

Flag football will make its Olympic debut in 2028, a push driven by the NFL in its attempt to globalize the sport. Speaking as someone who learned at an early age that they were too small to play football, I can attest that not everyone is equipped to strap on some pads and run an Oklahoma drill against some of America’s corn-fed giants. Flag football is broadly inclusive in a way that tackle football never can be, while still containing all the inventive playmaking that has made so many of us fall in love with this sport.

Great Britain had Japan down to 4th down, but then Japan ripped off this sequence to stay alive in this one.

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— Sickos Committee (@sickoscommittee.org) August 14, 2025 at 7:42 PM

Football is great, man. I do wonder how people will adapt to a non-contact form of it, but some kind of transition from tackle to flag football is already en route. My guess is that it will greatly aid the NFL’s desire to globalize the sport, probably even more so than the NFL’s inevitable expansion to a European division. Similar to other global sports like basketball and soccer, it doesn’t take much more than a ball and a field to play flag football, while tackle football is like hockey in that equipment needs rule out a lot of people below a certain income level.

I also think this push by the NFL to make flag football a bigger deal will alienate Americans, especially our big strong virtue signaling conservatives who currently are bragging about being too scared of the world to leave their office. These same kinds of people claimed to ditch the NFL the moment Jerry Jones took a knee for the cameras in supposed solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, but we know like everything else, these people are lying. Last year’s NFL TV ratings surged to a nine-year high. If conservatives are supposedly ditching this woke league en masse, then that simply means there are far more wokesters tuning in than Fox News uncles tuning out.

There is something deeply American about football’s war of attrition. ‘I am diagnosed with dementia, but I would do it all over again’ is the kind of poll response that could only come out of this fundamentally broken country. Again, I include myself in these contradictions, as the physical nature of the sport is part of its appeal to me. Watching Steve Atwater famously jettison Christian Okoye into a different dimension planted a seed in my kid brain that has grown into full-blown American brain worms as an adult. I am all for reducing the danger in this sport to protect the players, but it does look different from the football I was raised on and part of me wants to reject it. The NFL looks a lot more like flag football every year, especially in how it’s basically become illegal to do anything other than gently guide the quarterback to the ground in the pocket now.

But it’s still football. If a new change prevents more “game called early because someone was carted away in an ambulance” headlines, I’m all for it. These new rules instituted the past decade that would disqualify Steve Atwater from ever playing the sport are proof that the game is evolving away from its roots as a grinding ground and pound game, and towards a more exciting contest filled with big plays. It used to be an article of faith that a college offense could never work in the NFL, and now the league is filled with dual threat MVP quarterbacks running college-style RPO offenses befuddling defenses supposedly too strong and fast to be fooled by so-called gimmicks. The old adage was every NFL team had to establish the run and get physical in the trenches, then the whole league realized that Andy Reid was on to something being one of the few coaches passing more than running in the 2000s with the Eagles, and once the greatest offensive mind of this era got his Hall of Fame quarterback in Kansas City, Reid established football as a pass-first sport forever.

Which makes it tailor-made for flag football. This is where the NFL is headed whether Steve Atwater-brained fans like me want it to or not. Youth tackle football is now viewed by around a quarter NFL players from Atwater’s era as barbaric, and it is inevitable that most forms of football in the future will be flag football. This is what the NFL wants, the question is, will flag football also come for the NFL itself?

That may sound like a ridiculous notion on the eve of another season of brutality with multiple players still in the hospital as I write this, but it will seem less absurd when NFL players are putting together their own Dream Team in 2028, teaching the world how to play this beautiful team sport that maybe doesn’t require immense physical and spiritual sacrifice to enjoy.