TransGenderHawkFan":1q6woi34 said:
RiverDog":1q6woi34 said:
With all the medical issues surrounding football, in particular concussions, I would be very surprised of any football league, professional, semi pro, or otherwise, ever gets off the ground, either in this country or overseas. I certainly wouldn't want to invest very much money in such a venture.
For at least the past 50 years, football has been shrinking in terms of number of participants. It used to be that every college and most community colleges had football teams. Now a minority of them do. The sport is going the way of boxing.
The numbers dwindled because of operating budgets, not a lack of participants. There is some drop off in participation, but not enough to kill the sport.
A minority of colleges have football teams now? In what alternate universe are you living in?
Taking an unscientific, seat of the pants count and using the State of Washington as an example, there are 6 four year state colleges, of which 4 play football. Evergreen never has fielded a football team and Western recently canceled their program.
There are 9 other private colleges within the state with other sports programs (eliminating the DeVry institutes and what not). Pacific Lutheran, U of Puget Sound, and Whitworth play football, the others, such as Gonzaga, Whitman, Walla Walla University, St. Martin's, Seattle U, Seattle Pacific don't. 3 out of 9 play football. Add in the state colleges and out of 15 of them, 7 play football, or slightly less than 50%.
But then you toss in the community colleges, of which none of them field football teams anymore. Back in my day, ie early 70's, there was at least 9 teams in a two state league that played football. Now none of them do. I'm not sure exactly how many community colleges we have in the state, but when you factor them into the equation, there is substantially less than 50% legitimate 4 year colleges/universities and community colleges that don't offer football.
There are several reasons why participation is down, including budgets, legal risks, and Title IX. But the fact is that there are much fewer participants in college football today than there was 40 years ago.