USA Today Asks The Question No One Wants To Answer

"Is it immoral to watch the Super Bowl?"

That is the question that Tom Krattenmaker poses in an opinion column today, citing the massive amount of brain injury evidence and the fact that many parents are now withholding their boys from football as a result.

The Public Religion Research Institute did a study on the Super Bowl, the National Religion (at least as I call it) of football, and parents' attitudes toward letting their children play it.

• Football is still the favorite spectator sport, by almost 40% of this country.  The next sport down (basketball) has about 11%.  The only demographic which does not share this belief is Hispanics, who (to no one's surprise) prefer football of a different kind -- soccer.  ... which, of course, should also mean that they openly desire to see other people getting killed...
• ... as long as it's other people.  Over three in ten (31%) now state that, if they had a son, they would not allow the child to play football.
• It does appear that The National Religious nature of football is what draws people to it -- of the survey, only about 12% of people reported actually playing the game.  Baseball or softball more than doubled that number, but The Former National Pastime now ranks third, and only a tick above soccer, in fan interest.  And now children are gravitating away from playing baseball and softball more to playing soccer.
• An interesting statistic:  The massive interest in the Super Bowl is appearing to be aging.  Of the people surveyed, 30% of young adults said they were very likely to watch the game.  For those 50 and over, the number surges well over 40%.
• White Protestants are more likely than any other religious demographic to watch, with atheists (stated, more, "religiously unaffiliated") down around 33% of interest.
• If you need an idea of what America actually believes about football, watch this next point.  Basically, the players are villains to most Americans.  Between the concept of that they care more about money than the game and that they are poor role models, over half of those surveyed actually said what concerned them the most about football is a problem with the players.  Only 7% (correctly) noted that it encouraged violent treatment of women, and only a small sliver talked about concussions.  

So, to me, especially that last one makes me believe that, should my macabre prediction of the end of the Super Bowl (I'm not making it official by any means, but why do I get the feeling that Peyton Manning lurching for one final Hail Mary to win Super Bowl 50 -- and then getting his neck broken (throwing that winning touchdown pass) and killed right on the field with a crunching hit, clean or otherwise!) is actually THE DESIRED RESULT?

If this survey is indicative, most Americans believe that these players are not good people and "deserve what they get".  That they are discarded like old gears and die broken men is actually a GOOD THING to these people...

• Though most Americans concede that the sport is more dangerous than others, most Americans lie to themselves and say the game is not more dangerous in current years than in past years.

I'll just close this with the last two paragraphs from the editorial, because Krattenmaker states it better than I could:

"But as the years pass, I suspect qualms like mine will start infiltrating more fans’ heads. More will begin to see the ways in which our football spectating resembles the “sport” perpetrated in The Hunger Games, albeit without the direct killing. More of us realize that what we take to be a “game” that young men “play” is actually not a game, but a path out of poverty pursued mainly by the desperate.

As the sports-and-politics columnist Dave Zirin aptly puts it, the day is likely coming when “no one will play this game if they don’t have to. … The pool of players will become smaller and less economically affluent in the years to come. We will then have to reckon with just what the hell it is we are watching every Sunday.”