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Football Deathwatch: High School Edition

This article is more than 6 years old.

The National Federation of State High School Associations recently released its 2016-17 participation statistics, the best guide to determining how many American teenagers sweat.

Sure, it's interesting that participation -- as reported by NFHS' members, state associations that oversee scholastic sports -- is up to an all-time high of 7,963,535, thanks to a big boost from girls. (Participation means one person in one sports, so a three-sport athletes would count as three). From the NFHS:

The increase of 94,635 participants from 2015-16 is the largest one-year jump in overall participation since the 2008-09 school year.

Thanks to increases in all of the top 10 participatory sports, the number of girls participants reached an all-time high of 3,400,297. The increase of 75,971 from the previous year is the largest one-year jump since the 2000-01 sports participation report.

But, really, what you want to know is -- what about football? With years of reports about the risks of concussions, do the participation numbers reflect the coming death of the sport?

The NFHS doesn't think so, even though 11-player football participation by boys in 2016-17 fell for the sixth time in seven years, now at 1,057,407. From the NFHS:

Participation in 11-player football was down 25,901 from the previous year, although the numbers in 6- and 8-player football were up from the 2015-16 season. The overall number of participants in football (6, 8, 9 and 11 player) in 2016-17 was 1,086,748, down 25,503 from the 1,112,251 in the 2015-16 season.

...

With 14,099 high schools offering 11-player football, the decrease of 25,901 participants amounts to fewer than two individuals (1.8) per school, and an overall decrease of 2.5 percent.

Football remains the No. 1 participatory sport for boys at the high school level by a large margin. Track and field is second with 600,136 participants, followed by basketball (550,305), baseball (491,790) and soccer (450,234).

Since hitting its peak participation of 1,109,278 in 2009-10, 11-player football is down 4.6 percent, which hardly seems like a calamitous fall. On the other hand, the drip-drip-drip drop of participation over a long period is not a good sign. Nor is the sight of schools that should be plenty big enough to support football now dropping the sport, as has happened recently in New Jersey. And looking beyond raw numbers, the percentage of boys playing sports who are participating in football also is in steady decline. At the participation peak in 2009, 25 percent -- or 1 in 4 -- boys who played sports at an NFHS-affiliated school were on the football team. Now, that number is 23.2 percent -- and the .6-point drop from 23.8 percent in 2015 is the sharpest in recent memory.

There are a lot of reasons football participation is dropping, beyond concussions: increasing sports specialization, the concentration of elite players at fewer schools, bench players dropping out because football is too much work for so little time on the field. Whatever the reasons, this slow decline means football looks healthy on the surface, but there is some rotting underneath. It reminds me of something Ernest Hemingway wrote: "How do you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."