Will there soon come a time we are truly happy KU is a hoops school first...

Football as we know it is in a very precarious position. So many negatives including but not limited to
>It's expensive to run a program
>Injuries
>Overall "meathead" attitude of so many of it's players

The injury thing, however, is hitting it very hard. Case in point: when I was a kid (I'm 49 now) it was not only acceptable but socially elevating to play football. People wanted to do it, and you got a certain amount of respect from your peers if you participated.

Fast forward a couple of decades when my kids were young. More and more parents kept their kids out of it for fear of injuries. Nevertheless, there were still plenty of kids and such parents were labeled "overprotective".

Now, we've crossed a tipping point (at least around me) where most parents won't let their kids play, and those "overprotective" parents are now equating parents whose kids to play as almost child abusers.

We've crossed a tipping point in many cases. The media has jumped on the bandwagon. Now, the feeder system of little kids who graduate into middle school, then high school is being choked off. In 10-15 years, the pool of experienced players will have shrunk dramatically.

The NFL is aware, as is the NCAA. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

But let's not kid ourselves, basketball isn't safe. While we don't have the concussion issue, we need to thoroughly clean up our sport. The agents and all the pretense that college basketball isn't a profession for its players will ruin us if we let it. Not saying every program is dirty, but the bigger your program is, the harder it is to stay clean.

You are delusional if you believe that football is in trouble. It's not. It may be slightly less important in some areas of the country, but it's still the most important sport in the places that count as far as producing football players is concerned. Like everything that once passed as 'entertainment,' millennials are looking at the phones instead of actual life, and that is a threat to everything, not just football. But the game is alive and well, and will continue to be for a long time. As for KU continuing to be the worst major college program in the U.S., it has to change. It's one thing to be mediocre, which we were for over a century, but under the current administration, we have become the laughingstock of college athletics. Ineptitude of this magnitude is incomprehensible to most people, but to us it is becoming the norm. I don't see it lasting too much longer. Even the clowns who are running our football program, including our alleged AD, will soon be looking for work. And they may be looking for a long time, especially if they insist on staying in the football business.

The sport that is in trouble is baseball. Football is as popular as a high school sport as its ever been, and it clearly still has its college audience. The NFL IS in trouble, however, which is certainly not surprising to me at all. The Commissioner is a fool, and the owners define hubris and self interest. The players are totally disconnected from reality, and make so much money that any attempt on their part to appear 'connected' to the underclasses in our society is a joke. At some point the professional component will suffer even more loss of viewers, and we'll see a re-balancing of the way the game is compensated and made available to viewers and listeners. But as a game, played by boys and girls from the age of 4 on up, it's doing just fine. And technology is making it safer, and will accelerate that process in the next few years.

All I know personally is that friend’s 11 year old grandson played on a football team in Lawrence earlier in the fall. He had pads, helmet, shoes....the whole 9 yards. The gear leads me to believe they were not playing flag football.

In an earlier comment in this thread, Senex68 wrote: " It may be slightly less important in some areas of the country, but it's still the most important sport in the places that count as far as producing football players is concerned." This is indeed the case. Football, at least at the collegiate level, is quickly becoming a Southern sport. A high proportion of the good players grow up in the south (including Texas and Oklahoma as part of the south) and they want to play in the good weather. The classic Big 10 schools can't keep up. Nebraska is struggling. Wisconsin may be an exception, but I'Im not sure they are for real. In the meantime, two powerhouse schools in the Top 15 are the University of South Florida and the Central Florida. I don't even know what cities they are located in. As football becomes increasingly southern, interest will wane elsewhere, especially as the health concerns are amplified. A local high school here in the mountains was not able to field a team this year because not enough players came out for the team. I know this is a trickle, but here in the mountains soccer is taking over. We'll see how this plays out, but I wouldn't advise a struggling football school to invest a ton of money in that sport right now.

Football is clearly in decline, and there are any number of ways to measure it.....TV ratings, attendance, participation, and ad revenue. Not sure what other metrics there are.

Will it die tomorrow? Of course not, but the trend is clear. In the early 1900s bicycle racing (particularly on indoor velodromes) was a huge sport, and the original Madison Square Garden was built to accommodate it. How'd that turn out?

Football CAN take any number of corrective actions to reverse this, so who know how it will end up, but the current trend is directed straight toward 2nd tier entertainment.

As for baseball and other traditional US sports (mostly team ball/puck games), they're all being hurt by diversity as new sports are becoming more popular. There are only so many viewers out there, and 20 years ago, football was far and away what you watched on a Sunday in the fall. Now, you've got young people watching X-games, MMA, and any number of other things that either didn't exist or weren't on TV back then. You've also got 400 channels of programming, so if you DO want to watch underwater checkers, it'll be on somewhere.

I can tell you first hand that there are several high school football programs in my area that have folded. 9 college programs have folded since 2000. I expect that to increase which will result in some consolidation (big programs becoming more prominent), which will make the sport look stronger than it is.