Whither football

Tony Kornheiser thinks it will go the way of boxing and horse racing, eventually. Bob Costas doesn't think that, but he thinks you can't change the laws of physics, can't change basic realities or cold scientific fact simply because you wish that fact were something else.

And the scientific fact is, football players are getting bigger, stronger, faster.

And because they are getting bigger, stronger, faster, they generate many more foot-pounds of force than they used to.

And because they generate many more foot-pounds of force than they used to, blows to the head -- an unavoidable circumstance of the game -- are going to be exponentially more life-threatening (or at the very least quality-of-life-threatening) going forward.

Football is no longer a collision sport, not when linemen who went 260 pounds a half-century ago go 360 today. It's a car collision sport. Ask anyone who's ever stood on a college or pro sideline and heard two of today's behemoths fly into one another.

“The truth is the truth,” Costas said in a panel discussion the other night that sounded more like a eulogy for an American game. "Some of the best people I’ve met in sports have been football people, but the reality is that this game destroys people’s brains. … That’s the fundamental fact of football, and that to me is the biggest story in American sports.”

True and true. What is not true is that it's time to lay football to rest, say a few appropriate words and cover the grave with a spray of black-and-blue flowers.

No, football is not going to go the way of horse racing and boxing in the American consciousness, because it is more adaptable than either and not as much a vehicle for gambling or incorrigible corruption. Horse racing started to go away when it became almost solely the former, to the point where now you don't even have to go to the track anymore to drop a roll on My Lucky Lady in the fifth. Just stop by the OTB and watch your race on one of the many screens. It's a video game now.

And boxing?

It has always been infested with sharpies and wise guys eager to make sure the fix was in and to steal from the poor schmoes who stepped into the ring at their behest. And after Ali and Frazier and Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson went away, the lights went dark on its marquee heavyweight division -- and then along came mixed martial arts to steal its audience.

That isn't going to happen with football.

What is going to happen is the game will adapt, and adapt again, and if its price in maimed bodies and darkened brains will never entirely be cheap, it will not exact the exorbitant toll it does now. And if the old-schoolers grumble that the game is a pale, sissified facsimile of the game they grew up ...

Well. It always has been thus.

Fact is, your football is not your father's football, and your father's football was not your grandfather's football. And yet you still watch it. Between the college and pro versions, you watch it every day or night of the week in the fall.

"They might as well make it flag football!" someone occasionally grumbles when a quarterback is felled by a passing breeze and the official's flag comes out.

And yet he'll continue to watch.

And yet kids will continue to play it, because, what the hell, it's fun.

And the only difference, down the pike, will be the cosmetics of the game itself -- and also the demographics, because more and more players will make their pile and get out, and the player who's still around on the high side of 30 will be as a rare as a spotted owl.

But the game he leaves behind will remain. In some form or fashion, it will remain.