Obama Weighs in on Dangers of Football Football's reputation is taking a beating, with each troubling new report on the advancing science of brain injury, each new account of some brutal hit or serious injury at the collegiate or professional level, and each revelation about the damage the sport does to the lives and health of the men who play it. Now President Obama has weighed in, expressing his misgivings from the point of view of a sports fan and father. This is from his interview this month with The New Republic: Q. Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players. A. I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the N.F.L. players have a union, they're grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. That's something that I'd like to see the N.C.A.A. think about. Mr. Obama spoke cautiously about gradual change, but you have to wonder whether slow and incremental adjustments are going to salvage this game, given the steadily accumulating dossier of evidence that football as we know it is deadly. This is not just because of the spectacular brutality on display on any given Sunday, but also from the slow, often undetected, apparently permanent damage that repeated pounding can do to bodies and brains, starting when players are boys and young adults. The implications for football's future are serious, though the N.F.L. has been in denial about it for years. Recent revelations and the imminent Super Bowl have intensified the discussion, but the subject is not new: You can browse hundreds of articles from The Times's coverage of brain injuries and football here. Ta-Nehisi Coates, an editor at The Atlantic who has also been closely following this issue, recently posted an article envisioning the pro game's "impending death." You may find it hard to imagine that a sports-media-popular-culture-commercial phenomenon as huge and momentous as professional football would ever become obscure, culturally irrelevant or functionally extinct. But this is precisely what happened to two of the biggest spectator sports of the 20th century: horse racing and boxing. You can look at this front page of the New York Times from 1926, to see the heights from which boxing fell. Front Page - 1926 (PDF) Front Page - 1926 (Text)