We all watch football. But who is playing it?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on a bonus episode of “Post Reports” in honor of the Super Bowl, we go to one of the communities where tackle football still reigns.
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For decades, few things have united America as consistently and completely as football. But when it comes to actually playing tackle football — and risking the physical toll of a sport linked to brain damage — there are wide divisions marked by politics, economics and race, an examination by The Washington Post found.
As the sport grapples with the steep overall decline in participation among young people, some of those divisions appear to be getting wider, The Post found, with football’s risks continuing to be borne by boys in places that tend to be poorer and more conservative — a revelation with disturbing implications for the future of the sport.
Today on the show, we go to one of the communities where tackle football still reigns with reporter Michael Lee.
Today’s show was produced by Emma Talkoff. It was edited by Maggie Penman, Joe Tone, and KC Schaper. It was mixed by Sam Bair.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You might not be feeling this if you are planning on watching the Super Bowl tonight, but football is actually in decline. |
| 0:09.0 | A new study published in the journal Current finds half of parents do not believe that |
| 0:13.1 | tackle football is an appropriate sport for children. |
| 0:16.6 | High school football participation in Illinois is at its lowest point in |
| 0:20.5 | decades and kids aren't signing up for football like they did in the old days. |
| 0:24.5 | To be clear, watching football is as popular as ever, but when it comes to playing |
| 0:30.3 | football and risking the physical and mental toll of this dangerous sport, |
| 0:36.0 | a Washington Post investigation found that there are wide divisions marked by politics, economics, race, and geography. |
| 0:43.4 | We notice that states like Texas, |
| 0:45.3 | you know, places that you could kind of consider |
| 0:47.5 | football hotbeds are seeing football participation |
| 0:50.3 | in either stagnate or go in reverse, places like Ohio, places like Michigan, places that you |
| 0:55.8 | don't think of it's ever losing their infatuation for a tackle football, but it's happening |
| 1:00.3 | there. |
| 1:01.3 | Michael Lee is a sports enterprise reporter at the post, and he was one of the journalists |
| 1:05.5 | who was working on this investigation. |
| 1:08.0 | He and our colleagues found that where you live, how much money your community has, and how politically liberal or |
| 1:14.9 | conservative your state is, all play into whether you play football. But one of the |
| 1:20.6 | few places where football is still going strong is Mississippi. |
| 1:24.7 | And it's not just that kids there are still playing football. |
| 1:27.8 | There are actually more kids signing up. |
| 1:30.4 | And so we decided to, you know, explore what's happening in Mississippi where it doesn't appear that |
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