FOOTBALL IN AMERICA

ANGER AND ELATION, fear and fascination, hatred and love, all coexisting. Statistical figures that suggest one thing, boots-on-the-ground reporting that shows another. Sound familiar, America? In 2016 the sport of football, like this country, finds itself somewhere between a crossroads and an existential crisis. SI spent an entire month traveling the U.S., interviewing hundreds of people touched by the many tentacles the game stretches through society. The result: A portrait of today's sport that answers the question, How do we feel about football right now?

CHAPTERI

FOOTBALL IS UNDER ATTACK, unfairly maligned, too big to fail or already failing. It's concussions and Colin Kaepernick-on-his-knee; it's declining youth participation and diminishing TV ratings. It has peaked. It's $4 billion NFL franchise valuations, $60 million high school stadiums and $100 million player contracts. Still peaking. It's oversaturated, unwatchable and fragmented, too expensive to watch and too dangerous to play. Peaked. It's the lifeblood of small towns, the front porch of universities, by far the country's most popular and profitable sport. Forever peaking.

Football's place in American culture in 2016 can be debated from thousands of competing vantage points. Which is why SPORTS ILLUSTRATED dispatched two writers to traverse the U.S., hitting 30 states over the course of October, conducting hundreds of interviews with NFL owners, high school coaches and Pop Warner parents; Uber drivers, dancers, veterinarians and teachers....

All those disparate voices, all their conflict, all their angst, led to 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan on the day after Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States. Trump had said that he would fire the NFL's commissioner if he won. Yet here is Roger Goodell on Nov. 9, in his sixth-floor office at league headquarters, past the lobby adorned with glass-encased Lombardi trophies and an American flag. The NFL's insignia, its famous shield, is splashed everywhere. The NFL Network—not one iota of election wrap-up—plays on an array of TVs.

Goodell sits at an oak conference table. A framed print of falling confetti hangs on the wall behind him, near another Lombardi trophy. He leans back in a brown leather chair, sipping from a water bottle cradled in his left hand. He's asked about the election, and if he sees any parallels between the country and its favorite sport—citizens and fans who want change, who don't trust polls or ratings numbers, who think America has gone soft. "You guys are better to determine that than I am," he says. "Listen. What's going on in the country right now, we see it. It's out in front of us. People are looking for change and improvement, and that's our constitutional right."

He pauses briefly and adds, "But I'm happy to talk about football."

Three days ago he attended the Eagles-Giants game in New Jersey, and he says the fans he spoke to at various tailgates gave him an earful—but not in the way anyone who's worried about the game and its health and the safety of its players might expect. He says those fans spoke mostly about their teams, their favorite players and the various ways in which they consume football. They called the game an "escape"—like the Cubs winning the World Series. America needs those sporting diversions, Goodell says, now more than ever.

He's asked how often he hears about concussions and player activism in his travels. He must, right? "The fans are more interested in football," he says. "We are the ones who make safety a priority. They support that because they want to see their players play." But, he adds, "I'd be fooling you if I don't say: I hear guys that say, Just let them play."

The conversation unfolds this way for almost an hour, Goodell defending his sport and deflecting most of the criticisms lobbed its way with increasing furor. Take head injuries, for example. Goodell mentions that his twin 15-year-old daughters play lacrosse; how there's a debate in his household over whether they should wear helmets. They don't, he says, because lacrosse officials are afraid that would change the game, that it will become more aggressive. "O.K.," he says, "but I want my daughters to be as safe as possible ... and [at the same time] I want our kids to take risks."

Goodell comes across at times like a job applicant who's saying that his biggest weakness is "taking on too much." Everything is perfect. Under control. Nothing to see here. But that's not how the vast majority of Americans that SI spoke to felt. They said, en masse, that they think concussions are a serious problem. SI polled fans at airports and stadiums and restaurants and classrooms, and in a formal survey found that 94% of respondents believe head injuries in football are a "serious problem." To this, Goodell points out that the NFL made 42 rule changes focused on player safety in the last 14 years. "The 94% is [reflective] of our effort to make the game safer," he says. "The NFL has been a leader in this area. What we've found is that people don't truly understand all the things we've done to make it safer."

The ratings drop? That's the result of a number of factors, Goodell says. Games that went head-to-head with presidential debates. The unpredictable competitiveness of certain matchups. The new ways in which young people watch. "Any theory or any consideration—we look at all that," he says. "There are still the same number of folks—maybe even slightly more—actually watching. We're reaching them [in ways other than through broadcast television], and they're engaging with football."

He says at least half a dozen times—in response to questions about perception and domestic violence and player discipline and approval ratings—that the league will do everything it can to grow football in the long term. That's everything from studying the length of commercial breaks to how long it takes officials to review instant replay calls, from streaming games on Twitter to growing football internationally. "Listen, I understand there are a lot of opinions," Goodell says. "What we really try to do is get beyond just the opinions and get to what we're doing to address the issues that have real substance to them."

Rain falls outside his windows on the Manhattan streets. "Football unites people," Goodell says. "It brings the country together."

That's one take on football in 2016, delivered from a perch high above Park Avenue where one of the sport's most powerful figures directs the country's most powerful league. Football in America? From the street level, it's far, far more complicated.

IT'S SUNDAY afternoon, Oct. 2, outside Mons Venus in Tampa—one of 10 profitable game days the renowned strip club will enjoy in 2016. The Buccaneers and the Broncos are about to kick off a mile down the six-lane urban highway that hums nearby. Manager Bernadette Notte isn't a football fan, but she knows the Bucs' schedule by heart. "In the late summer I put it up on the bulletin board in back so the girls can see it," she says in a smoker's rasp. She has spent the week reminding the dozens of dancers in her employ that the place will be packed today with football- and nudity-loving fans and their wallets.

A dancer named Josie approaches. Young and waifish, with a whiff of Goth to her look, Josie makes clear that she and her coworkers are independent contractors; they come and go as they please. "There's no schedule." Which means Josie can come in for the pregame rush, leave and do something else for a few hours, then return for more twerking and cash raking later. In total this evening there will be 30 to 40 girls dancing for hundreds of patrons, a collision of football and vice that results in what Notte estimates is a 50% spike in business.

"Depends on who [the Bucs are] playing, what city [the guests] are from," Josie says. Green Bay games mean plenty of loot for everyone. "The Cheeseheads are the best fans who come in here," Notte interjects. "They're amazing." Saints fans too. "I'll dance for beignets," Josie says with a giggle that is drowned out by an apocalyptic rumble overhead—a fleet of choppers from nearby MacDill Air Force Base is rattling over Raymond James Stadium in a tribute to football and country.

Across the street at 2001 Odyssey, manager Shawn Douglas, a South Carolina native, likes the Gamecocks and the Panthers, but he loves when Carolina's NFC South rivals win down the street. Home games increase his club's usual Sunday haul by "50 to 100%—easy," he says.

Inside Odyssey's main door, visitors are greeted by an assault of deafening music and plasma TVs that right now show the Bucs' offense hurling itself in vain at the Broncos' defense. The stage is empty. Five performers work the sparse mid-game crowd. A dancer named Shannon sits in a private "champagne room" the size of a minivan's interior. She is physically beautiful in the ways that most heterosexual men measure such things, but "my last game day I only walked out with $100 for about eight hours [of work]," she says. Shannon is in her 30s and has been doing this since she was 18.

"Denver is really far away, so I don't expect too many of their fans here tonight," she says, nodding to the plasma above the stage. "Dallas is usually good. Green Bay. New Orleans. Atlanta—those guys like to spend money.... Every girl knows when every game is. Most of us have little pocket calendars."

Shannon is a football fan, albeit a conflicted one. "I'm definitely a firm believer in this whole CTE movement," she continues, clad in nothing whatsoever. "It's like the military—there should be more aftercare. Does the NFL cover them for life?"

No. "They should."

"Football is an American institution," she continues. "I don't think you can have an America without football. If there were more rules to protect the players, I don't think it would make it any less manly or fun to watch—or any less American."

A man hands Shannon a $100 bill. Her lips unveil perfect teeth. ZZ Top's "Got Me Under Pressure" comes on, and the lyrics might well have been written about the sport flickering silently across the room.

She's about all I can handle.

It's too much for my brain.

Later Shannon will point out that she's a successful small-business owner who works here "because it's an ego boost." She says she's concerned about her younger coworkers, who she says are uneducated and "express themselves poorly.... I wonder what their exit plan is." The club has its Adam Vinatieris, too. "We have a girl who works at night who is 52. Gorgeous. Little bit of fillers around her eyes, but not gross looking."

Shannon has a teenage son who played football until high school. Despite his broken nose and separated shoulder, "I didn't mind it at all," she says. "We have good insurance! ... My parents always told me to try anything I wanted."

She might get out a nightstick

And hurt me real, real bad

By the roadside in a ditch.

A blonde stripper about half Shannon's age writhes expertly on the pole while, in an upper corner, Tampa Bay defensive tackle Gerald McCoy kneels near midfield, wincing, gripping a freshly injured leg that has ended his day and will keep him out of next week's game too. The tableau evokes something Bernadette said earlier, about managing the roiling turnover on her roster of entertainers: "We get new girls every day."

UP THE STREET, halftime of that Broncos-Bucs game features a 10-minute Pop Warner exhibition, as dozens of NFL games do each fall. But in this game a 10-year-old player named Charlee stands out in the areas of foot speed and physicality, not to mention for the brown ponytail that flaps behind Charlee's helmet.

Charlee Nyquist is a girl, but the most important things to know about her have more to do with her speed and tenacity. The naked eye shows her to be faster than most boys on the field. An outside linebacker, she engages, sheds and swims past blockers despite a thin build and a face that American Girl magazine would kill to put on its cover.

"Because I'm a girl," Charlee says, "people think, She just wants a touchdown—that's why she's playing. That's not why I'm playing. I play because, first off, I want to be a role model for other girls. I want girls to get playing." Her second reason for playing, she says matter-of-factly, is "hitting. It's something that girls think of as scary and just ... not normal. But I think it's cool."

Wearing her grass-stained jersey, without shoulder pads, Charlee sits in an empty concourse inside Raymond James Stadium. A lightning delay has interrupted the fourth quarter of what will ultimately be a 27--7 Broncos win. A mesh bag containing her helmet lies next to her pink-socked feet.

"I'm pretty fast, so next year I might be playing running back," she says, "but I like hitting because it's just"—she laughs—"I just think it's fun. You get this feeling of excitement. Everyone is like, Yeeeah!"

Charlee's dad, Eric, stands nearby, arms folded, beaming. He's a NASCAR executive, but the most important things to know about Charlee's dad are that he loves whatever his daughter loves and that he hardly misses a second of it. He isn't delusional about her dream of playing college football. If anything, he's frustrated. When Charlee's out of earshot, Eric, 45, says, "Lingerie football is the only outlet for women who want to play tackle football. That's ridiculous. Those women are amazing athletes, and there are lot of them. I bet every one of them loves playing the game." How does this key player in a pro sports juggernaut, a businessman whose first job out of college was a two-year stretch as the NFL's manager of business planning, recommend this chasm be filled? "If the NFL takes this on, they gotta start somewhere like Orlando or Dallas, where there's enough collective mass [to sustain a women's league]."

"I almost had a sack out there," Charlee says later of her halftime performance, her little-girl lisp belying a confidence that makes her seem 20. "But he only got like a yard. And it [set up] second-and-long."

Does she ever think about getting hurt?

"Yeah, sometimes, because one kid broke his rib cage. And one of my own teammates—I was substituted out one play, and he went in and broke his arm. And I thought, That could have been me. But it's football. You're gonna get hurt; you're gonna get hit."

Over the course of 20 minutes Charlee says something along the lines of "I want to be a role model for other girls" 13 times. She lays out her plans to start a league for women and predicts that in 10 years she'll be the first female in the NFL, "because it would show women that they're as strong as men." Even her dad seems a little stunned by the world-changer he and his wife, Michele, have created. "Our thing is, 'kind and happy,'" he says. "We want our kids to be kind to others—and to be happy. That's it. All of this," he adds, waving a hand toward his child and the NFL stadium she just conquered. "All this is...."

He can only shrug.

ABOUT 550 MILES due north of Tampa lies Presbyterian College, a small liberal arts school in Clinton, S.C., that offers a freshman class called The Religion of SEC Football.

Professors Terry Barr (English) and Michael Nelson (History) are fans of the Alabama and Arkansas football programs, respectively, although fans is probably too mild a word. So deep is their knowledge of those teams' three-deep depth charts, so committed are they to the Tide's and the Hogs' Saturday kickoff times and the three hours that follow, that these academics often find themselves perplexed by the scale of their own devotion. Hence the course, which in essence asks, Why?

"Two guests today," the tweed-coated Nelson says at the start of one class. "Dr. Sarah Burns is a PC graduate who went on to Tennessee to get her Ph.D. in psychology. She teaches in our psych department. And Dr. Doug Daniel, who teaches in the math department." For these two scholarly visitors, Tennessee football is their fixation. What follows is not unlike an AA meeting.

Burns's dad (last name: Connor) named his daughter so that her initials would be S.E.C. She accompanies her presentation with slides, including one that reads, "Jesus is a Volunteer, Galatians 1:4." The bearded Daniel reads aloud from a 10-page essay he wrote recently about his boyhood love for the Vols, which deepened even as he gathered postgraduate mathematics degrees. The harmonic analysis researcher points out that the mathematical chances of Tennessee completing the Hail Mary that beat Georgia four days earlier had been 0.23%.

"We invest more of ourselves into this sport than we do in our faith," Nelson, 46, points out. "Sometimes our families." There are chuckles, but one listener disagrees. Burns, 37, cites her familial upbringing and the game's "regional associations"—the us-against-them of college football—as the sources of her addiction. She talks about the weekly ritual of it, about how "we structure our entire lives around Saturdays."

The class ends with a brief and sobering discussion about death threats recently directed at LSU's 21-year-old QB, Brandon Harris, who threw a costly interception against Wisconsin. As students gather their books and file out, the sky outside has darkened. The storm that will become Hurricane Matthew—and which will cause Florida's game that weekend against LSU to be rescheduled, which in turn will cause Florida's Nov. 19 date with Presbyterian to be canceled—is taking shape hundreds of miles to the south.

Barr, by email, will note weeks later that "[Presbyterian] is getting somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000 to not play Florida. Is there a price low or high enough to save us from that [beatdown]? ... Divine intervention, that hurricane, comes through in the end! We are saved from ourselves!"

SPIRITUALLY, it's a long way from SEC country to the single-lane roads that traverse Scooba, Miss., with its two gas stations and its population of 716. Scooba is home to a Subway, a motel, a row of boarded-up storefronts and, notably, one of the best juco football programs in America, East Mississippi Community College. Or, as the popular Netflix series filmed here calls it, Last Chance U.

Head west from those pump stations on Johnson Street, past the bank and the beauty salon, and there's the Lions' Sullivan-Windham Field, named after Bob "Bull" (Cyclone) Sullivan, EMCC's coach from 1950 through '52 and again from '56 through '69. (Lest you forget him, there's a 7'6" bronze statue outside the stadium of the dually nicknamed coach whom Frank Deford, in a 1984 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED cover story, pronounced "the toughest coach of them all.") Sullivan favored leather helmets without face masks long after most coaches. He conducted goal-line drills and sprints in a nearby pond, and when one lineman removed his new shoes so as not to ruin them, Sullivan ran him barefoot through blackberry vines and sticker bushes. Another player nearly drowned. "I've heard people say [Sullivan] couldn't coach today's athlete," says 60-year-old Nick Clark, who played for the Bull from '64 through '66 and who now works as EMCC's vice president for institutional advancement. "If someone was rolling around with a knee injury, he'd yell, Boy, that damn knee is four feet from your heart! You ain't going to die! If he did that today, somebody would probably sue him."

If Sullivan embodies the tough-love, no-water-breaks, what's-concussion-protocol? football generation, then the current program illustrates the way the game has changed. The Lions play on an all-weather turf field and wear eight different uniform combinations. For the last two seasons they've been chronicled on Netflix, whose cameras trail the players one October afternoon as the P.A. announcer leads a pregame prayer, asking God to watch over the teams and the country. There's no kneeling during this national anthem. Every single player, coach and fan holds hand to heart.

Between EMCC and its opponent this evening, Northwest Mississippi Community College, roughly 50 Division I--caliber football players take the field, including Lions quarterback De'Andre Johnson, who was dismissed from Florida State in July 2015 after a video surfaced showing him striking a woman at a bar. (He accepted a plea deal for misdemeanor battery last December, apologized to his victim on national TV and has since volunteered at a battered women's shelter. "This," he says, "is my second chance.") Fans with camouflage cellphone cases and American flag hats pack the stands as Johnson scores five touchdowns and accounts for 442 total yards in a 51--32 triumph.

Afterward, Netflix cameras roam the field, and Johnson takes a picture with his position coach, Clint Trickett. Like Johnson, Trickett, 25, never expected to settle in a one-stoplight town near the Alabama border. The son of a coach, one of three brothers who now work in football, he played at Florida State and West Virginia and then retired in 2014 after suffering five concussions in 14 months. The Johnson-Trickett snapshot is one of football in modern-day America: a QB kicked out of school after video of his crime went viral ... a young coach who wants to stay in football despite his concussion history ... a season chronicled for a popular reality TV show that is streamed over the Internet....

Trickett, though, retains some of Sullivan's tough-guy coaching ethos. "I hope it doesn't get to the point where we're being soft with [this game]," he says. "The second the softness takes away from the integrity of the game, you gotta draw the line."

"Look," he continues, "the good [of this sport] outweighs the bad a million to one. I'm fine. Football will be too."

THAT SEEMS abundantly clear an hour west, on the campus of Clemson, which on a warm fall day provides a snapshot of a more traditional football player and program. Hunter Renfrow came here two years ago as a 155-pound walk-on wide receiver. Last January, at 175 pounds, he caught two touchdowns against Alabama in the national title game. He knows what it's like to be on top of the totem pole and at the bottom.

Right now the redshirt sophomore is sitting in a sunlit terrace high above Memorial Stadium wearing a purple-and-orange DREAM THE DREAM T-shirt. Behind him, in the distance, lies a vast construction site, where Clemson's new, $55 million training facility--palace is being built. The Tigers are unbeaten and ranked No. 3 in the country, but football's advances stop for no man.

Renfrow, 20, has scored seven touchdowns in his college career and, by his estimation, suffered about that many concussions since he began playing football in grade school. "I played some of my best high school games with a concussion," he says. "I was watching Last Chance U not too long ago, and Clint Trickett said football has given way more to him than concussions have taken away. I go along with that. I don't really worry about it too much."

What Renfrow sees as the biggest threat to college football has nothing to do with the game's physicality. He hates the idea of scouting combines and Rivals camps, where individual players are valued above their teams. "That's why some players don't care about the team." Clemson weeds out such players, he adds. "No one here thinks he's bigger than the team." The reason is "culture," Renfrow explains.

No one expounds on that notion better than Thad Turnipseed, who is one of Clemson coach Dabo Swinney's best friends, as well as his director of recruiting. More than any man but Swinney, Turnipseed is responsible for the palace being built adjacent to Death Valley. Today, huge tractors roll across the clay upon which the sprawling edifice is being built, forming orange clouds slightly darker than the jerseys Clemson wore three days earlier in an epic win over Louisville. Before you judge the building for its planned two-lane bowling alley, though, or its nap room, or the massive playground slide that connects the second floor to the ground floor, first listen to Turnipseed, 44, describe the philosophy behind it all. He doesn't deny that the building's biggest purpose is to attract recruits. It's what happens after those recruits arrive that he believes sets Clemson apart.

"Dabo's challenge to all college football programs is, We gotta start building better people and stop using kids," says Turnipseed, who likes to show recruits' parents the 38 surveillance cameras positioned throughout the property. ("This ain't gonna be Animal House.") He also shows them where the CU in Life program will be housed ("for training in life skills and community service") and the future homes of the Fifth Quarter initiative ("for professional development and job mentoring from our alumni") and the Tigerhood program ("How do you become a good man? How do good men think?"). "This is more about philosophy than facility," Turnipseed says, adjusting his hard hat amid the whir of power tools.

How does he respond to those who criticize a college football program with a planned 12 plasma panels in its main foyer and a football-shaped couch the size of an end zone? "Right, wrong or indifferent," he says, "the front door of your university, at this level, is the football team. There's no other avenue where you can have 30 to 50 million people engaged with your institution like we had at the national championship game. I'm not saying that's right. I'm saying that's reality.... It's not debatable whether a successful football team is good for a university.

"So that's how I'd answer that."

AT THE Residence Inn in Pensacola, Fla., the middle-aged white woman holding down the front desk considers Football in America, same as Trickett and Renfrow, but without the personal investment. "Football is like riding a motorcycle," she says. "There's only so much a helmet can do."

No one knows that better than 74-year-old James Andrews, who works across the Pensacola Bay at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine and whose cellphone rings nonstop at dawn on Monday mornings in the fall—20 calls one Monday, 45 the next. He puts the device on speakerphone and holds it inches from his face; it's always a general manager, athletic director, agent, coach.... So-and-so hurt himself in our football game last weekend. Can we send you an MRI?

"We're picking up the pieces from college and pro games that weekend," sports' busiest and most famous orthopedic surgeon says. "The wreckage." Games mean broken bones, torn ligaments.... Football, Andrews says, is not a contact sport, as it is often described. "It's a collision sport. If we started a new sport today and we wrote up the rules and regulations and we called it football, they probably wouldn't allow it."

On weekends Andrews attends games with Auburn, Alabama and the Redskins, all of whom he works for. Team doctors occupy an odd space in the sports universe. Many of the players they care for don't want to let on that they're injured; coaches don't want to remove their best athletes from the game; fans want championships; universities want revenue ... and here's this doctor, whom nobody really trusts, trying to navigate a minefield where money matters most. Down the hall from Andrews, fellow orthopedic surgeon Steve Jordan, who previously worked as Florida State's team doctor for 24 years, says that the players he encountered in his past rarely talked about head injuries—except for how to navigate around them in order to remain on the field. One player, he recalls, was knocked down, hit in the head right in front of him. "You O.K.?" he asked. The player bounced up, yelled, "Yeah, it's my ankle," and ran back onto the field.

"Most [players] were dishonest—a majority," says Jordan, 60. "As a doctor, you felt the pressure from the player. You feel the pressure from the fans."

But a doctor's proximity to the NFL's best players doesn't mean he can easily connect with those directly responsible for their health. Back in April, Andrews sponsored a football-injury conference in Destin, Fla. He invited orthopedic surgeons, biomechanists, trainers, therapists ... and coaches. Guess which group had the smallest numbers? "I've tried to get coaches to come and listen to injury prevention talks," he says. "You almost have to trick them to come." On the field, he says, "they have a taboo about even talking to the team doctor."

ONE GROUP that will listen, undoubtedly: moms. An afternoon's drive to the northwest, in Atlanta, more than 100 of them—the majority of them African-American, all local—are running go routes behind Rich McKay as the Falcons' president and CEO explains the difference between the Moms Clinic he's hosting one October evening at South Cobb High and the slightly patronizing "Football 101" seminars that the NFL has largely moved on from. "[Football 101] went through the basics of what a first down is, the four downs, timeouts." McKay spreads his arms wide, revealing the squadron of mothers behind him. "This is all about health and safety, arming moms with information about the risks of the game and how to mitigate those risks. Then we let them have a little fun on the field."

The laughter and dropped passes and tackling drills in the background are a physical release for women who just spent an hour watching demonstrations on how to properly fit their sons' helmets and pads, how to navigate the confusing world of supplements and PEDs, how to balance academics against the statistically slim chance that their sons will play college ball.

Out on the field, clinic director Buddy Curry, a former Falcons linebacker, starts doing what he does best. "One!" he yells. Every mom, having just been coached on this, stomps into a half-lunge. "Two!" Their rear feet come forward, forming 100 squats. "Squeeze!" One hundred sets of shoulder blades retract. "Sink!" The squats deepen. "Rip!" Four hundred hands and hips fly forward with surprising synchronicity and speed, completing the tackle. "Break down!"

"Hunnnh!" The collective two-foot stomp and grunt is loud and visceral.

When the clinic is over, eye-black-wearing mom Marilyn Mason, whose 16-year-old plays for South Cobb, explains, "I came here to see football from my son's perspective. The first time he got tackled [in Pop Warner], I cried. He had a concussion last year that was very difficult. It hurts me to watch him play, but I know football keeps him disciplined and teaches him to be part of a group."

Adrienne Harden's three-year-old son scored his first flag football touchdown two weeks earlier for the Hiram Hornets. She came tonight "because this my baby, my three-year-old baby—"

"—Wait till contact," interrupts a friend.

Lavita King and Stephanie Green are the mothers of two South Cobb seniors. "The safety issues we talked about tonight," says Green, "I didn't know them like I thought I knew them." Learning about PEDs and hearing the surprising news that not every supplement at GNC is good for her son "was awesome, I needed that." Asked if the information they learned tonight arrived too late in their sons' lives, they exclaim, "Yessss!" Their chorus is joined by a third mom who works in a nearby hospital "that gets a lot of football injuries."

Green explains the feeling of watching her son play, calling the physical sensation "like a tightening."

"Dads can say 'just shake it off,'" says King. "But not us mamas."

IT'S 9 A.M. on a Sunday, and a mostly empty city smells like urine and stale cigarettes. Welcome to Bourbon Street. There's a street performer on the corner strumming a guitar, his case nearly empty. Between songs he declines to discuss the current state of football, waving dismissively as he talks. "What do I care about rich people destroying other rich people?"

An hour later, as kickoff between the Saints and the Panthers approaches, vendors hawk Mardi Gras beads and face-painting services on Poydras Street outside the Superdome. Scalpers work the area across the street from Champions Square. One recalls how his father resold tickets at the Superdome, back when fans wore paper bags over their heads. Times change, same as football. Fans pay more now, especially the visitors. "I don't watch football much," he says. "But I damn sure need the money."

Inside, the game kicks off, and in the top row of the stadium, in section 608, a middle-aged telecom exec leans against the wall and says his "interest has waned significantly the last couple years." He played lacrosse when he was younger, sustaining multiple concussions. An imaging scan recently revealed damage to his brain, he says. Both of his sons have dealt with head injuries. That concussions in football have always bothered him comes as little surprise. And yet there's that conflict. "They have to make the game safer or it's barbaric—but then when they make it safer, it's ruining the game," he says. "It's an unsolvable conflict, an unfixable problem."

Besides the Saints, he hardly watches football these days. ("How many gladiators do you watch anymore?" he asks, sighing.) He's aware of the decline in ratings and, like Goodell, thinks that results from many factors. In New Orleans, he says folks like his brother-in-law swore off the NFL after the Bountygate scandal. "There will always be football," he says, "but it has reached its peak."

The second half resumes, and he gets lost in a last-minute Saints victory. Afterward, New Orleans safety Roman Harper is told about the musician who doesn't care, the scalper who needs the dough and the fan in section 608. "I would tell them, Enjoy the product we put out there on the field," he says. "We sign up for this. I've been trying to kill and hit people since I was eight years old. That's my decision."

"The game," he says, "will change with the time. You can't be the dinosaur. You gotta be the crocodile."

THE NEXT morning, 80 miles northwest in Baton Rogue, Pulitzer Prize--winning author Jeffrey Marx considers the Saints and football over a shrimp-and-crawfish omelet. He's not conflicted. Never has been. "In my writing I've tried to explore my belief that sports are the most popular platform in America. Period," says Marx, 54. "Not just football—but football probably is the most powerful of sports in its ability to reach young people."

Marx became a Baltimore Colts ball boy when he was 11 and worked four summers for the team. Those experiences, he says, changed his life. Fast-forward to 2001, when the team's old venue, Memorial Stadium, was being torn down. Marx called as many of the players from his childhood as he could find. He stumbled upon Joe Ehrmann, a Colts D-lineman from 1973 through '82 who had become a minister and high school coach in Baltimore.

Ehrmann had started a mentoring program called Building Men for Others, and he attacked what he called fake masculinity in football. Instead, he emphasized emotions that one doesn't typically associate with athletes. Love. Empathy. Kindness. His coaches yelled, What is our job? and players responded, To love us!

In 2004, Marx wrote a book about Ehrmann and his program titled Season of Life. In the subsequent 12 years he says he's heard about the book's impact from someone every single day. He explains how a judge told him recently that he'd assigned a convict to read the book and then write about it. The essay partially determined his sentence. That's the kind of impact football can have, Marx says, why it will always exist, always thrive.

"Football is the most violent sport in America, and it's causing all sorts of problems," Marx admits. "It's equally a fact that when the sport is used in a strategic way, it can change lives, families, whole communities. I don't think those facts are mutually exclusive."

CHAPTERII

THE GRAND POOBAH OF Football in America sips iced tea inside a conference room at his latest cost-be-damned sports palace. Jerry Jones, owner of the most valuable sports franchise in the world ($4 billion), arrived in Frisco, Texas, earlier this afternoon from Arlington, via an airbus H145 helicopter, at what he calls the Cowboys'"world headquarters." He sits down and gestures at his kingdom, which is named the Star and sponsored by Ford. "Before we're through here, we'll have spent almost $2 billion," Jones, 74, says with a shrug, dropping interview notes on a table, never to look back at them.

The topic: the current state of the nation's most popular sport. Jones is as responsible as anyone for a moment in football history that he calls "very unique," and if he's being honest, this moment snuck up on him. "We"—and by this he means himself and others in positions of power, at all levels of the game—"may have taken for granted that the decision-makers know that football is good for you," he says. "I've just assumed that everybody would get it and [the lessons] would get passed along.

"Football's not for everybody," he goes on. "I'm not complaining, but maybe I had blinders on when I bought the Cowboys [in 1989 for $140 million]. I didn't see that we needed to say any more until probably the last 10 years."

Jones takes another sip of tea and launches into his personal football history: four seasons as a fullback and guard at Arkansas, national championship in 1964, the thesis he wrote on the role of communication in football, the father who told him that with a career in sports he would "never amount to anything." This continues for half an hour—the lessons learned, the sacrifices made, how he wouldn't own a stadium and a helicopter if not for the game. "The point of that whole long-winded deal is this," he says, "I've had [football] in my blood."

Tears well in Jones's eyes. (Misting, he calls it.) Football provides myriad similar experiences, he says, especially for "the 70% of our players who have had no male role models apart from their coaches." Critics, he says, miss the point of it all: the community, the ties that bind generations ...

The conversation winds to player safety and head trauma. Jones saw only clips of the movie Concussion. He knows that Jeff Miller, the league's senior vice president for health and safety policy, acknowledged on Capitol Hill last March a link between football and degenerative brain disorders such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Jones does not agree with Miller or the many doctors and studies that share the same view. He just believes it's too early to know anything definitively. "We're drawing conclusions so far out in front of the facts," he says. "I can live with that, as long as we understand that I've seen milk and red meat [debated] for the last 30 years, whether they're good for you or not."

He wants football to be safer—as safe, he says, as it can be. He wants studies, research, plans. He advocates making smaller face masks to "reduce the courage" of tacklers who are tempted to lead with their heads.

Another sip of tea and Jones says that what has surprised him most about being an NFL owner is how the league is expected to lead the way in combating domestic violence, promoting activism, advancing safety procedures. While many would argue the NFL has failed in those areas, especially when it has come to early research on concussions, Jones disagrees. "I'm going to carefully choose my words here," he says. "The game of football is convenient to involve in the discussion of head injuries. Anybody who stops and thinks for a few minutes will realize that many other sports involve contact with athletes' heads. Many other occupations do, as well.... I don't become unduly alarmed. We don't have the answers. There is no such thing as the answer."

After 90 minutes Jones is still talking, getting even more passionate. He's built a 12,000-seat indoor football stadium at the Star, and it is being used by eight high schools. It's a mini AT&T Stadium: same seat backs, same turf, same polish on the concourse floors. There's a VIP viewing area. Nike will outfit all the teams. Jones did this, he says, because he wants to reach parents directly. They'll ultimately decide if their kids play football, when they can play tackle, for how long. He calls his sparkling new headquarters an "oasis" connecting professional and amateur sports, and he sees harmony between the two going forward.

"Whether it be concussions, whether it be the issues with player behavior—take everything we're looking at," he says, "and then take what I saw in 1989 when I gave everything I had to [buy the Cowboys]. That was a bleak picture back then. This, today"—the billions of dollars being moved, the spot atop the American sports totem pole, the growing global footprint—"this looks like the clouds have parted compared to then."

HOW 'BOUT them Cowboys!? Clad in a silver-and-blue number 4 jersey, Phil Ebarb orders a Boudin sausage at a seafood kitchen in Grapevine, Texas. From where he sits, it's about a 20-minute drive to AT&T Stadium, where his nephew, Cowboys rookie quarterback Dak Prescott, is preparing to face the Bengals this afternoon.

Ebarb, 50, isn't hungry though. He's nervous. It's one thing to worry or scream or track a player's progress from vantage points removed—on a couch, on a fantasy app. But that's his blood out there on the field, the boy who wore an Emmitt Smith jersey growing up in western Louisiana. Before Ebarb's sister Peggy died of colon cancer in 2013, he promised her he would look after Dak, who chose number 4 because his mom was born on the fourth of September. She loved the contact in football, the way bigger defenders couldn't drag down her boy.

"It's emotional," Ebarb says. "Proud, first and foremost. You're concerned—worried this world is going to wrap him up, worried for his heart, worried about his health. And then there's the excitement. You can't wait to see it. You're ready. You're bewildered. It's surreal that this is reality."

Where Jones's eyes "misted," Ebarb's pool with conflicting emotions. "You don't reconcile them," he says. "You navigate them. You're the ball in the pinball machine—thrown here, pushed there. You feel all of that in the same minute, at the same time. It's ... overwhelming."

Ebarb is a singer-songwriter who worked with James Brown and hung out with Willie Nelson; his band performs what he calls "musical gumbo," a mix of up-tempo country and rock. He'll soon require hip and knee replacements after all those years onstage. A fractured disk in his back during high school ended his basketball career, the same as knee injuries halted the professional football aspirations of Dak's father, Nathaniel, who was invited to an NFL training camp, and Dak's brother, Jace, who was once a top college recruit. "Twice the athlete Dak is," Ebarb says.

Yet Ebarb views all those injuries through the prism of sacrifice—the price men pay for what they love. "If you work at a school and some nutbag shows up and shoots at kids and kills teachers, do you quit?" he asks. "We have to do what we have to do. You can't stop livin', man."

He pulls up a text message he sent Dak yesterday. It reads, in part, "When you're smiling out there, it confirms for me you do this for the moments. That's why I play music. The moments that haunt. Create your moments. I love you."

"Let's don't get it messed up," Ebarb says. "Dak is a performer. This is an entertainment business. Football is a machine, man, and the machine rolls on."

THAT IT DOES. Even as Ebarb watches from AT&T Stadium's lower level as Dak and the Cowboys dismantle Cincinnati 28--14, the high rollers in box seats feast on produce from an organic farm 25 miles to the southeast, the very spot where, just nine years ago, Paul Quinn College gave up its football program in favor of ... agriculture.

Here, just south of downtown Dallas, rows of cucumbers, radishes, basil, tomatoes, jalapeños and bell peppers grow between two goalposts. One afternoon, three days after the Cowboys' win, tilapia swim in an aquaponics system that is 70 yards from a blank, antiquated scoreboard. Hens lay eggs near a cartoon rendering of an anthropomorphic radish in full Heisman pose.

The man responsible for this gridiron garden, school president Michael Sorrell, arrived here in 2007, shortly after an analysis from the Boston Consulting Group concluded that the private, historically black college could no longer afford NAIA football. Sorrell looked around—at the "food desert" surrounding campus, with so few healthy options; at his weight, which had ballooned by 15 pounds since his move; at the former football players, whom he could spot by the way they limped; at the Tigers' record, with just 11 wins from '00 through '06—and made what he describes as an easy and prudent choice. The We Over Me Farm opened in May 2010. The school saves about $600,000 annually by not having a football team.

The players didn't take it well. They tried to intimidate Sorrell and griped about losing a chance to play professionally. This went on until Sorrell challenged them to raise $2 million to save the team, promising to match that amount and open an endowment. No one raised a dime. Gradually, the complaints subsided. And now, with the Cowboys as the farm's top client, Sorrell says, "we've sent more kale to the NFL than football players. In reality, not having football saved our institution."

Sorrell's choice speaks to what he sees as football's inherent conflict. "You create an economic engine [with] this sport; that impact is extraordinary," he says. "But the reality is, you also sacrifice a few souls. Bodies will be racked and damaged for the benefit of many." He shakes his head. "I'm not sure if football isn't the banking system in 2008. It's too big to fail."

Here, though, is that conflict again: At 50, Sorrell remains a die-hard Bears and Cowboys fan. He respects the power of football's platform, in which a backup quarterback can kneel during the national anthem and spark debate, outrage, maybe change. "Athletes are breaking the code," he says. "The code used to be: We paid you a bunch of money ... do what we say. It feels like the sport is changing."

Bigger change, transformative change, he says, will come from the mothers who can veto football as a choice, just as Sorrell and his wife did with their own son. In the end he brings the conversation back to the students who receive a $5,000 tuition credit by working Paul Quinn's farm. "I want them to understand that the surest way out of poverty is to be the guy who signs the front of the check, not the back," he says. "Jerry Jones is a genius—flat-out. He played football.

"But what side of the checks does he sign?"

THERE IS a complete spiritual opposite of the We Over Me Farm a mere 45 minutes to the north, straight up I-75. With 18,000 seats and a 38-foot-wide video board, Allen High's $60 million Eagle Stadium is Friday Night Lights in middle age. It's all the excess of Texas high school football wrapped up in one place.

The Eagles jog onto the field through billowing smoke and a giant inflatable a, with the nation's largest high school band (almost 800 students) performing in Halloween costumes (Barney Rubble on trumpet, Dracula on drums), and Football in America is thriving. Allen's residents voted by a two-to-one margin in favor of a $119 million bond in 2009 to build the venue, along with a fine arts auditorium and a district service center. The Eagles then won state titles in each of their first three seasons in their new home, starting in '12 (though all of the '14 games were played on the road after district officials shut down Allen's stadium to repair extensive cracking).

Tonight fans are tailgating, wiping away meat sweats, spoiled by success. They're smoking brisket, grilling sausage, lathering ribs in barbecue sauce. One says he has watched Texas high school football every Friday for 55 years. Another notes how this stadium has become something of a novelty, with visitors from as far as Canada this season. "If you can't get fired up here," an older man in an Allen hat says, "then your wood's wet."

Near the front entrance, at a makeshift tent for the program's booster club, adults grumble about Colin Kaepernick and player protests and the NFL in general. Several say they're watching less professional football this season, if at all.

As Allen's band director (Waldo) leads a sea of instruments in song, Chris Tripucka, the 53-year-old owner of a football-souvenir shop, sees the Eagles take a 42--7 third-quarter lead on Guyer High. Tripucka's father, Frank, played at Notre Dame and then for eight NFL and CFL teams over 16 seasons, ending in 1963. (The Broncos retired his number 18 jersey this season.) In 2013 the man friends called the Tough Polack died at 85 from, Chris says, "a combination of Alzheimer's and dementia that I know was caused from all the hits to the head." Still, even as Frank's condition had worsened, the Tough Polack lamented the state of Football in America. He had played one game with a leather helmet and most of his career without a face mask. The game he loved had gone soft.

Chris played receiver at Boston College in the '80s, and he undergoes cryotherapy each week from a helmet shot he long ago took to the spine. His oldest son, Shane, is the punter for Texas A&M. Shane had also lined up at receiver for Allen, until he took a brutal hit one scrimmage and his coach decided he didn't want to jeopardize the kid's scholarship chances. Chris broke the news to Shane, who cried for an hour. Secretly, Chris was relieved. "Having played the game, I know what the risks are," he says. "Those risks didn't bother me as a player. But they bother me as a parent."

On the field Allen is running out the clock. Tripucka loves these Friday nights and what they mean to his community, how the lessons doled out on that field teach boys to become men. He hates that third-graders practice in full pads, and he hates how today's kids specialize in one sport before they hit puberty. He disdains those things—but he can still get behind Allen's $60 million stadium. The town needed it, he says. Besides: McKinney High, a school without Allen's gridiron tradition, is building a $70 million venue seven miles up the road.

The clock hits zero and fans stream toward the exits. "I look down on the field and I see that the numbers aren't quite what they normally are," Tripucka says, referring to what he sees as a dwindling player pool. "You're seeing a small impact.

"Even in Texas."

FIVE HOURS to the south, but still in the thick of Texas football country, the first of four San Antonio Colts youth football games are under way on a Saturday morning. The outfit fields four teams across age groups from four to 13 and has 104 participants altogether—players and cheerleaders—down from a high of 140 a few years back. They're drilled by 39 coaches, and, like the 50-odd other youth football organizations in San Antonio (part of the 270-plus that make up the Texas Youth Football Association), they play almost year-round. They take only January off.

Colts president Robbie Adame, 31, surveys the field as one flag player, four or five years old, grabs a handoff and runs the wrong direction. Other leagues in Texas, Adame says, start at three. "Too young."

During their 2013 and '14 seasons the Colts participated in the Esquire Network's reality show Friday Night Tykes. Their coach then, Marecus Goodloe, was suspended after the first season for using foul language, one of myriad abhorrent acts—screaming coaches, helicoptering parents—the series highlighted. After that aired, TYFA membership climbed 35%, to about 18,000 players. "People act a certain way on TV," says Adame. "When they approached us last year [about filming another season], I told them I'm ready to be back to normal. I don't need all that." The injuries, though, are all real. Adame says the Colts average "five or six" concussions each season. He even recalls one on the Colts' flag team. When the movie Concussion came out, he says "probably three parents" took their kids out of the league. One father still wanted his son to play, even after the boy suffered two head injuries in four months. "I need something that says He's cleared," Adame told the dad. "I can't have that on my conscience."

Two Midget teams, ages six and seven, sprint onto the field through a banner that says TIME TO POUND, past posters reading COLTS STRONG and BIG GAME and SLEDGEHAMMER. One parent wears a T-shirt with HIGHLY AGGRESSIVE splashed across the front. A coach sets up a video camera in the stands. They'll study the tape next week.

Wesley Vallejo, a locksmith who helped found the Colts in 2003, says they used to recruit each weekend. They'd set up a tent on the main drag near the field and hand out fliers, selling parents on the program. They fought to retain their best players, who were constantly courted by other teams. "Losing games," Vallejo says, "is equivalent to losing kids."

Later, as two Rookie teams of eight- and nine-year-olds take the field, Colts coaches yell, "Is everybody ready!?"

In unison, "Yes, sir!"

A Junior Barons linebacker slams a Colts running back, and the Barons' sideline erupts. Parents chest-bump. "Textbook, baby!"

"That's how you hit, boy!"

After the Junior teams (10 and 11) kick off, one Barons coach screams at his players. If they don't want to play hard, he says, he'll find someone who does. Later he disagrees with an assistant's play-call suggestion and tells the man to "go sit in the f------ stands with your wife." The assistant leaves.

A parent yells, "Hit somebody!" A Colts player is down. One dad walks onto the field and shouts, "Put him on his back!" Later, another Colt is down. Nearby, two bench players throw rocks at a tree.

Another injury and coaches wave with urgency at the medics, summoning five volunteers who've come from nearby military bases. There's an altercation between parents in the stands.

"Carolina is down," a mom declares. His banner hangs on the fence behind him: JAY$HAWN #1 CAROLINA. Four parents carry a tent onto the field to shield Carolina from the sun. Medics roll out the ice chest. An ambulance and two fire trucks arrive, and Carolina is carted off on a stretcher. Play resumes.

Colts coaches tell their players, who are down two touchdowns, to win this one for Carolina. One teammate walks over to Carolina's sign, clasps both hands together and prays.

Another teammate comes to the bench holding his head. His father, a coach, says, "That's part of football, son. I would have hit your ass too. That's the way it is. Lazy-ass football players get hurt."

Another child slumps on the bench with a sprained ankle and a mom declares, "We can't have somebody getting hurt every play."

A sixth injury in this one game. A fourth stoppage. A player limps off the field holding his left arm, and the medics, who arrived to find no medical supplies, fashion a splint out of an orange crate.

"This is crazy," says one medic, who identifies himself as PO3 Ross. "I've never seen anything like this. The parents are the worst. Some are worse than my drill sergeants."

The game ends.

"Jesus," PO3 Ross says. "It's done."

"Y'all gotta get some fight," one of the coaches tells the Colts. "We can't coach 'fight.'"

"At the end of the day, in football you're going to take bumps, bruises and broken bones," says one parent, who declines to give his name. "If you don't want to play football, go run track."

"Somebody gotta say it," he says, laughing.

JESSENIA QUIÑONES isn't laughing. Every week dozens of NFL players lie flat on her massage table, their bodies dotted with black and brown and purple bruises, their fingers bent, their spines twisted. They've absorbed the impact of helmets to their hamstrings and braved the force of large men landing on their backs. That's football, they tell her. Contact on every play, injury as an occupational hazard.

Quiñones, 35, sits in a coffee shop back in Dallas, a day after treating several Cowboys players, one who hurt himself against the Bengals. "The doctor told him his neck is like he's in his 80s," she says.

A licensed massage therapist, the 5'3" Quiñones says MMA fighters come to her in the worst shape, but NFL players are a close second. No other sport approaches that level. The football players' biggest complaint, though, isn't the pain. It's that they don't get help, she says. "They're what we call fakers at the facilities," she continues. "They don't seek the attention they need. What makes me the saddest is that they're not able to tell their trainers, 'I'm really hurt.' Teams teach them how to talk to the media, how to manage their money. They don't teach them how to manage their bodies and their health."

These same players express no regrets. "The money keeps them there," Quiñones says. "They have a wife, and then they have a baby coming...." After they retire, she says, then they worry about their health. Then they never miss appointments. One retired NFL player whom she treated this week told her he regrets not taking her advice more seriously when he played.

Quiñones wishes more teams employed massage therapists, acupuncturists and holistic healers. "They pump these guys full of Vicodin," she says, "but that's masking pain, not taking care of it, camouflaging it so they can play again."

After years of working on athletes twice her size, Quiñones feels the impact of pro football. "I want to start getting out of it," she says. "It's murder on my hands.

"Football, it takes its toll."

JERROD BLACK sure hopes so. "This is going to sound bad," he says from Christie's, a sports bar in Dallas's Uptown neighborhood where he's watching Monday Night Football over chicken wings and fries, "but I'm always looking for an injury."

A 27-year-old aspiring NFL nosetackle who benches over 500 pounds and squats more than 600 but who hasn't yet found a temporary roster spot (let alone a permanent one), Black is eyeing job openings. He is heartened tonight by Buccaneers running back Jacquizz Rodgers, a third-stringer seven days ago who, due to injuries, will get 30 carries against the Panthers. Suddenly John Hughes III, a defensive end whom Tampa Bay signed a week ago, is down, clutching his knee. "The universe is speaking right now," Black says.

The call will not come this week, or the next, and that is typical of life on the NFL periphery. For every Aaron Rodgers there are 400 NFL hopefuls like Black, though his example is extreme. Last December he was out of gas, out of options, parked outside the facility where he trained in Carrolton, Texas, when he asked himself, Where am I going to sleep tonight? Black was too proud to call his parents and too broke to pay for a motel room. He grabbed a pillow and a blanket and fixed a bed in his truck. He lived there for more than three months, spending his days in the training center and his nights in the parking lot, listening to crickets chirp.

On the fringe of professional football, he asked himself another question. Dude, when are you going to stop and get a regular job?

The answer, still, always: Not yet. Black grew up in Houston, was courted by the likes of Texas A&M and Nebraska, then went to Iowa State, where the forgettable Gene Chizik era ended when the coach bolted in mid-December 2008 for Auburn. Chizik told his team, "I always support the Cyclones." Then he walked out. Black says 16 members of his recruiting class transferred.

He landed at Southeastern Louisiana. He worked out for two NFL teams. He played indoor ball for the Green Bay Blizzard. He tore his right ACL. The Bucs called his agent, only to find out about the injury. The Cowboys brought him in for a visit in May 2014, then they signed someone else instead. Black's agent would call. We might have something. Always another tease.

He came to see how thin the margins were, the difference between the back end of an NFL roster and sleeping in his truck. Three of his Iowa State roommates, none of them stars, played in Super Bowls.

When one friend, former Giants safety Tyler Sash, was found dead of an accidental pain-medication overdose and then was discovered to have had CTE, Black began to worry more about concussions. And still he pushed on, reaching out to executives on social media, contacting reporters. "I'll give it until the end of this season" he says now as he finishes his fries.

Buoyed by a new partnership in an organic tequila company, Black is no longer homeless. He swears he had a dream recently in which he was playing for the Seahawks, wearing a blue jersey, walking out of the tunnel onto CenturyLink Field.

That dream, for now, sustains him.

CHAPTERIII

THE TEARS START ALMOST immediately, running down both cheeks as Jordan Shelley-Smith tries to explain how much football matters to him, how desperately he wanted to continue playing. It's killing him that he's sitting here while his Kansas teammates prep for Oklahoma State. Six weeks ago he was on that field with them, a starting left tackle with a shot at the NFL. Now he's just another former D-I player, a 22-year-old senior forced to retire because of concussions.

Inside the football communications office in Lawrence, Shelley-Smith's sentences start and stop as he wipes at droplets that say what his words cannot. That he misses football. That he's weaning himself off the high. "My dad told me to play with no regret," he says, "but this is all I've done, all I knew. My body just tapped out."

He leans forward, hands clasped, eyes still wet. The Jayhawks were one of just two winless teams in all of FBS last season, and in 2016 they were off to a 1--2 start when Shelley-Smith retired. But he deems his decision "the toughest call I've ever had to make. I have to deal with that every day for the rest of my life."

Shelley-Smith arrived at Kansas as a 6'5" tight end, converted to the line and played in 30 games. Then he sustained a concussion in October 2015 during a loss to Oklahoma State, and the headaches lingered into this fall. He got on the field only once this season, in a loss to Memphis on Sept. 17, after which the headaches became more frequent. The pain was worse than anything he'd ever felt. He was slow in practice, sometimes dizzy. "I noticed it most in the hitting," he says. "I felt ... off."

He was cognizant of all the players, pro and college, who'd retired in recent seasons, their decisions, like his, colored by individual circumstances but sharing a similar theme—that the more players know about concussions, the more likely they are to leave the game early, faculties intact. Even though Shelley-Smith didn't care for the movie Concussion, even though he felt like the media had an antifootball agenda when it came to head injuries, he was more aware. Everyone has become more aware. So Shelley-Smith discussed the risks with his team's doctors, training staff and coaches, and with his fiancée. "The thing with your brain is, you really don't know," he says. "Ultimately, it came down to future health."

On Sept. 26 he told his teammates. On Sept. 27 he started to lose the weight he'd put on to play O-line. He was 302 pounds the day he retired but has shed 25 pounds since. He's taking classes to remain on scholarship after completing his degree in supply-chain management last spring. He works with his former teammates on their drills and in breaking down film, and he watches games from the sidelines. That has helped with the transition. In December he'll start working at a local retail outlet as an area supervisor.

He won't be alone. All over the country players like Shelley-Smith—players who love football, who learned discipline and earned college degrees on scholarship—will weigh the impact on their health from repeated head trauma. At Kansas, two of Shelley-Smith's teammates retired in recent seasons for similar reasons. One week after Shelley-Smith walked away, so did starting Oklahoma linebacker Tay Evans. That's Football in America, where it's becoming O.K. to say No más.

"Look, the more people talk about head injuries, the more people like me are open to making that decision," Shelley-Smith says. "More people understand what's at stake. Things are definitely changing."

So will Shelley-Smith let his son play football? Without hesitation: "Of course."

THE SIX officials seated around a conference table at the office of the Parsons (Kans.) Recreation Commission can sympathize with the teary former footballer 130 miles to the north. They, too, weighed the impact of head injuries in football, and last summer switched their third- and fourth-grade tackle leagues to flag. Not everyone at the table agreed with that decision, but overall the town of 10,000 "was pretty welcoming of the change," says Gary Crissman, the PRC's executive director.

Maybe it helped that Shaun Hill, a former Parsons High QB who's now a backup for the Vikings, wrote an open letter to his hometown defending the commission's choice. Or perhaps the dangers of head injuries are just too obvious to ignore in 2016. Whatever the reasoning, there are 84 children playing flag football for the PRC this fall, more than triple the number who participated in tackle one season ago.

The six officials will oversee the playoffs tomorrow and so far report no major injuries. They're even considering changing their fifth- and sixth-grade leagues to flag. As they talk, a life-sized cutout of Hill smiles creepily in the background. He's a local hero, the son of former Parsons High assistant Ted Hill, who wouldn't let him play football until sixth grade. As a seventh-grader Shaun injured his neck; Ted made him sit out the next season.

Not everyone buys Shaun Hill's arguments in favor of flag football: players don't collide as much, their heads slam into the turf less often, they can spend more time on noncontact fundamentals. Emilio Aita, a longtime PRC coach, says that most studies about the benefits of flag aren't specific to youth football. Still, he left his children in the PRC's flag league, even as one asked him, "Daddy, can I just keep playing soccer until you let me hit somebody?"

Hill, meanwhile, hopes Parsons's switch will help eliminate one safety issue among many surrounding the sport. Asked by phone whether he's concerned about his own health, he says, "If I had any worries, I wouldn't still be playing."

FLAG FOOTBALL?Players retiring over concussions? Good luck explaining such things to Gary Lothrop, a 59-year-old veterinarian and Nebraska fan who every week writes scathing emails about Cornhuskers football and fires them off to 500-plus eager readers. Eighteen hours before the Huskers host Purdue down the road at Memorial Stadium, he settles into a booth at Greenfield's Cafe in Lincoln and orders a club sandwich. He's weighing the risks-versus-rewards of Football in America, but he's coming to an altogether different conclusion from Shelley-Smith's or the PRC's.

"I always tell people, 'Jeez, I stick my arm up a cow's ass, up to my shoulder, for six bucks [as part of my job]. Sometimes I get crap in my ears.'" He sighs. "Everybody's [job] risk is different."

He's asked, Are players—particularly those at an FBS stalwart like Nebraska—taking an acceptable risk? Is football even a career choice they should have? "I don't know how to weigh in on that," he says, "but I do know: They have turned football into a game for people that should wear pink panties! They're a bunch of pansies!"

He mentions his three children, Nebraska fans all. His daughter suffered a concussion while playing youth soccer; his younger son sustained three concussions. Lothrop says he wishes the NFL hadn't "tried to bury" the issue of concussions but then adds, "I can assure you, 90,000 Nebraskans would not show up for flag football games."

The next morning, three hours before kickoff, Memorial Stadium's parking lots are already filling up. T-shirts read i see red people, hats are affixed with giant ears of plastic corn and one food truck displays a popular slogan: THROUGH THESE GATES PASS THE GREATEST FANS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL.

Most of them, anyway. Before a game at Northwestern in September, three black Nebraska players knelt during the national anthem. One of them, senior linebacker Michael Rose-Ivey, was called a "clueless, confused n-----" on social media and told he should be kicked off the team, lynched or shot. One fan suggested the threesome be hanged the next time "The Star-Spangled Banner" played. Lothrop says he's embarrassed that a player received death threats, but he's not surprised.

That incident came four weeks after Kaepernick knelt during the anthem. That, too, struck a nerve in places like Lincoln. When the three Cornhuskers followed suit, Gov. Pete Ricketts called them "disgraceful" and "disrespectful"; two university regents echoed his thoughts.

In the lot before the Purdue game, fans like Greg and Vicki King share the regents' sentiments. Their son Jason, a senior, starts at left guard for the Boilermakers. Every week Greg, 59, and Vicki, 53, drive nine hours northeast from Little Rock to Purdue's campus in West Lafayette, Ind., where Greg fixes their son breakfast on Friday mornings. If the team travels that afternoon, so do they. "We've never missed a game," says Greg.

When Jason graduates, they're not sure how often they'll continue to watch the sport. "You can't ignore the players who are having personal issues with violence," Vicki says. "That's turning off a lot of people."

Greg nods. "When the right persons come back to represent football, it'll change. The ratings will go back up. Some of those guys on the forefront—Kaepernick, for instance—they're taking the audience away from football. Football is my release; it's like what some folks go to church for. I don't want to think about all that stuff at a game."

Even if most fans here agree that the game is not as healthy as it once was, they tend to peg football's ailments on someone else, something else, somewhere else. Parents are too serious at youth games.... The NFL was ruined by big business.... Those damn millennials don't respect tradition....

What fans want most is for their way of life—the romanticized way they see their own past—to remain unchanged. But it doesn't, and they're angry about that. So they drink beer. They scalp tickets. They hug their relatives. They try to hold on to a time that wasn't so confusing, a time that meant so much to them, before everything was different, before players knelt during the national anthem.

The Purdue game marks Nebraska's 352nd straight sellout. Afterward coach Mike Riley takes questions from reporters—mostly male, mostly white—who ask about the run game and the impact of special teams and his O-line woes. They, too, have lost themselves in football. On his way out Riley kisses his wife on the cheek, then he walks through a door that reads TRADITION OF TOUGHNESS and heads out into the night.

HALFWAY ACROSS the country Mike Riley's brother Edward, a professor of anesthesiology at Stanford and a former QB at D-III Whitworth University in Spokane, nurses an amber ale. He's seated in the back of Seattle's Zoo Tavern while one of the presidential debates plays overhead on the TVs. Patrons half-listen as they shoot pool and roll Skee ball.

Riley, 58, is here to weigh in on a different—but no less political—argument, one about football safety, concussions and a spate of former players who've committed suicide. He's a doctor, a healer, but his views align more closely with Gary Lothrop's than with Shaun Hill's.

Two years ago, when his youngest son expressed a desire to play football, Riley decided to study the medical literature available on head injuries. And after reading through the studies he concluded that concerns about the sport are "misplaced." Take one paper, Riley says, that examined nearly 3,500 former NFL players with at least five years of pension-credited seasons between 1959 and '88. That analysis looked at the league's highest-possible-risk subjects and found an incidence of neurodegenerative disease three times that of the general population. It also found the risk of death from neurodegenerative disease to be low for both groups—4.9% in former players, 1.5% overall. The way Riley reads it, that study shows that "the risk associated with a long NFL career is not insignificant—but it remains small."

It's too early, Riley says, to draw too many conclusions. Studies that have correlated the number of hits sustained by different position groups—more for, say, D-linemen than for QBs—with impaired cognitive function didn't measure the same function beforehand. Quarterbacks, he says, could have been higher-functioning to begin with. The pathologists who've found scars on the brains of dead players? They haven't yet done the clinical trials that would firmly establish a connection between repeated head trauma and brain damage, Riley says. "Typically, pathologists end their reports with stuff like 'clinical correlation needed,'" he continues. "We don't see that here. There's research, but it's early—and in the press, [doctors] seem to be stretching beyond what they normally would say."

While the beer drinkers around him mock the candidates on TV, Riley adds a disclaimer to his argument. He knows how this might sound, as if he's a doctor for Big Tobacco. He isn't saying football is safe, or risk-free. But he is saying the sport needs long-term epidemiological investigations that follow youth or high school players for 40 or 50 years, examining how they lived, where they came from and how they died.

Riley sustained concussions in his own football career; he once forgot his name when a doctor asked. Still, he says, "it should be a personal decision" whether or not to play. "People need to understand the risks—but the antifootball people need to realize they're involving their kids in other things that are even more risky than football. Like skiing. Equestrian jumping. There's no comparison there."

Both debates continue, two candidates arguing about America and Riley arguing about football's place in it. He mentions Todd Ewen, a hockey enforcer whose family believes he may have shot himself because he thought he had brain damage. An autopsy did not find CTE on Ewen's brain, which doesn't mean it wasn't damaged by playing hockey. "Suicides can develop contagions," Riley says. "It's called the Werther effect: Somebody famous commits suicide and kids copy it. What happened with CTE is it created a narrative for [football players] to have a fatalistic view of their lives."

He pauses, sipping at his beer. "We just don't know enough yet."

MIDWAY THROUGH that debate Trump fields a question about gun rights and points out how in Chicago they have the toughest gun laws in the U.S., and yet, "by far, they have more gun violence than any other city." Eighteen hundred miles northeast of Las Vegas—2,000 from Edward Riley in Seattle—Larry Williams, the football coach at Chicago Vocational Career Academy, shifts on his stool at the President's Lounge bar on the South Side and raises a Red Stripe. "Here's to hope," he says. Hope for America. Hope for his team. Hope for his star running back as he recovers from multiple gunshot wounds.

Hope is what Williams, 43, has left. "The streets are winning the battle the coaches used to win," he says. "We can't compare to the streets. Nine times out of 10 players will choose the streets instead of coming to practice."

The Cubs are about to play Game 1 of the World Series in an hour, but Williams's mind is on Sept. 10. After his team's first loss of the season, he boarded a plane to Kansas to watch his son play junior college football. Hundreds of text messages pinged on his phone when he landed. Everett was shot six times. Call me.

A running back and defensive back who was drawing interest from mid-major colleges across the Midwest, Everett Henderson had accounted for 90% of Chicago Vocational's offense. Williams visited him that Monday, and not only had the 17-year-old survived six shots to his hands, buttocks and abdomen, but he was walking down the hospital halls with one of those bullets still lodged in his chest. Henderson told his coach what he remembered: He was sitting on his porch, sending text messages, when a man put a gun in his face. Henderson jumped off the porch, ran and heard pop-pop, pop-pop, pop, pop. As he bled on the ground, he says, the gunman stood over him and continued to shoot, even after running out of bullets. Then he walked off.

As Henderson recovered, Vocational's season collapsed. "We had to cancel our homecoming game because of death threats to Everett," Williams says. "Reporters kept asking, What gang was he in? I kept saying, He didn't exhibit that around the team." (Henderson has since been cleared to work out; police have not publicly I.D.'d a suspect.)

Patrons are buzzed into the President's Lounge, past signs reading NO WHITE T-SHIRTS and NO ONE UNDER 30. Williams sighs. He knows that the violence, the poverty, the fight for resources—it never ends. It's hard for him to get his players to school. Many walk through gang- and drug-infested neighborhoods. He spends $150 a week to get them bus passes, buys them meals, hands out Gatorade. "Out of my 25 kids, probably two of them [live] with their dads," he says. "We've got to teach them the basics, like hygiene, how to brush their hair—things a teenager should know."

Williams describes Vocational's locker room, its equipment and its stadium as "deplorable." Everything is outdated, broken, chipped or torn. He can hardly keep 25 players on his roster; sometimes he can't get enough kids to show up to hold practice. The school district, perhaps sensitive to all of these issues, wouldn't let him meet with a visiting reporter on campus, so here he is at a bar, three miles from his alma mater, winner of 11 city championships, where Dick Butkus once starred. CVCA used to teach 32 vocations; now it's only six. A building that can hold 4,000 students is now home to about 920.

Through it all Williams sees improvement in his players, who largely go to class and plan for college. "That's why football is so important, now more than ever," he says. "If I have 22 kids [on my team], that's 22 kids who won't be in somebody's gang, 22 kids that mothers won't have to bury. The gang violence in Chicago is uncontrolled; you can't stop it.

"But this is America. You have to try."

CRYSTAL DIXON has a message for parents of kids under 14 who say they love football so much that they're willing to assume its risks, who say things like, Everything is dangerous. You can get hurt walking down the street.

"It's not worth it," she says. She's sitting in a coffee shop in Torrance, Calif., five years to the day after her 13-year-old son, Donnovan Hill, was paralyzed from the waist down during a Pop Warner game, and seven months after he died at age 18 following what should have been routine surgery. "I was one of those cheering parents," she says. "I loved football. My dad took me to Raiders games. But there was a lot I didn't know until Donnovan got hurt."

To those who point out how rarely injuries as severe as Donnovan's occur, Dixon says, "Last year 17 kids died from football-related injuries. A couple weeks ago a kid got hit in the stomach and died two days later." She pulls up a story on her phone about a Texas teen who died 48 hours before this meeting, following a JV game. "It keeps happening."

One of her most difficult realizations came after her son's death. "I didn't know Donnovan had a brain injury until we donated his brain to Boston University," she says. "They told me it was so bad they wanted to keep studying it. They'd never seen anything like it. Just from one hit."

Some collisions that cause catastrophic injuries can appear harmless. The headfirst, open-field tackle Donnovan attempted on Nov. 6, 2011, looked bad in every way. "Fourteen years old—high school—is the earliest a child should play tackle," Dixon says. "Donnovan [thought it should be] 12."

Dixon says her son's concern about the game, and his passion for it, coexisted after his injury. "After he got hurt, he didn't want to watch football. Then he started getting comfortable with what had happened, and it got easier. After that, he watched every Saturday." Oregon was his favorite team. The college game was his passion, which is why his mom can only watch pro games. Later today she'll catch the end of a matchup between the Broncos and her beloved Raiders.

"I have a love-hate relationship with football," she says. "I'm on the fence. I lost my kid to it, but I know how he felt about it. He still loved the game."

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Peyton Smith likes the sport that his famous father plays, but he loves a different one. He is the son of Ravens receiver Steve Smith Sr., one of football's toughest and most outspoken characters, hypermasculinity in shoulder pads. But while Peyton watches football and follows football, he does not play football. He's a freshman at DePaul, and he's here in Chicago on a soccer scholarship.

Smith took up the so-called beautiful game when he was four, displaying the speed, athleticism and shiftiness that has positioned his father as a potential Hall of Fame inductee. He tried football at 12, played the same position as his dad and wore his number, 89. "It was a lot of pressure," he says, "and I definitely wasn't as good at it as soccer."

Peyton wears a red n.y. hat turned backward and black-framed glasses as he emphasizes that he's not antifootball. He grew up watching as his 5'9" dad built a fearless reputation by traversing the middle of the field, even before rules began to discourage targeting. Sixteen seasons of hit after hit. "Always entertaining, but definitely nerve-racking," Peyton calls it. "Especially for my mom. She freaks out a lot."

Peyton was at the game when his father tore his Achilles last season. Three months later Steve was there, beside his son at the dais, beaming, when Peyton signed his DePaul letter of intent after piling up 30 goals and 28 assists as a senior at Carmel Christian in Matthews, N.C. The scene highlighted soccer's growing popularity. Peyton, like most of his friends, wakes up early on weekends to watch the English Premier League. His viewing options for both sports have multiplied in recent years. He watches soccer online and catches football on Twitter every Thursday.

Football's critics, Peyton says, overlook the physicality in soccer. He sustained a concussion when he collided with an opponent at 12. He cites a former teammate who missed more than a year following a head injury; now he plays college soccer, but he's not allowed to head the ball.

As for his dad's sport, "it will always be pretty big," Peyton says. "But head injuries are definitely a factor now; people are concerned about it." He pauses, considering the future. "Soccer is a good option," he says, "but I don't think it'll surpass football. I don't think football will ever die."

A NYONE BOLD enough to imagine the death of Football in America might as well make the three-hour drive north from DePaul, hugging the shores of Lake Michigan, to Green Bay. In Titletown, there are more pro football players than there are Uber drivers, which says as much about the size of the city (pop. 105,000) as it does about the outsized importance of the game in the heart of Packerland. Those drivers are often called upon to drop visitors off at Packers landmarks, their rides consumed by conversations about what the game means here.

Take Jason Murphy, a 911 dispatcher who drives for Uber in his spare time and who let his previous ride off at the Packers Hall of Fame. "I was explaining how football is so rooted here that you almost take it for granted," says Murphy, in a camouflage Green Bay hoodie. "Like, Lambeau Field is two miles from my house."

He steers his Subaru Legacy past a house door painted with the likeness of Brett Favre, past fences decorated to honor the team's 27 division titles. He describes this season as "a little sketchy," what with all the injuries at running back and the inconsistency from Aaron Rodgers. "We're spoiled," he says of a town that's grown fat on football. "Two weeks ago the Packers were booed at home. I understand...."

He trails off, leaving unsaid what seems obvious, that Football in America is changing, even in Green Bay. Strangers still wave as cars pass through the neighborhoods around the stadium. Fans still hang green-and-gold bird-feeders on their porches. Tourists still stop by the statues of Vince Lombardi and Curly Lambeau for photos. But that quaint, small-town vibe now competes with the chaos of construction. The Packers are building a Titletown District on 34 acres of land just west of Lambeau. The plans call for a sledding hill, an ice skating trail, a playground and a hotel, plus "commercial and retail elements"—less Titletown, more Titletown, Inc. The total cost: between $120 million and $130 million, $65 million of which comes from the team's initial investment.

"It's a trade-off; you can't keep the true small-town feel [if you want to] have revenue," says another Uber driver, Larry Pongratz, as he pilots his Ford Fusion down a street named after current coach Mike McCarthy. "Look what they're doing—they're taking over an entire city block."

He's in a philosophical mood: "They'll get it sorted out. Same as on the field. I miss the bone-jarring hits. There seem to be less of them. But I might be a little bloodthirsty, too." Pongratz sighs. "We'll always have tradition."

YOU WANT tradition? Meet David Baker, whose voice booms as he recalls Trump visiting his workplace in September. The Republican presidential nominee was in Canton, Ohio, and wanted to see the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where Baker is the president.

The two men discussed the crisis the sport faced in 1905, when at least 18 people died playing football, and how President Theodore Roosevelt famously stepped in, encouraging safety changes and the forward pass. Roosevelt, Baker says, "saved football" and the "values that it teaches."

But now? Now "the whole game is so screwed up," Trump told one rally in Reno. He promised to make America great again. Football, too, presumably.

"We may be at another Teddy Roosevelt moment," Baker, 63, says now. "The game has been under attack. Because of concerns over concussions or the violence in the game, it has somehow become politically incorrect to speak out for football.

"I believe there is an incredible silent majority out there that loves this game, that think it's valuable," he continues. "If you ever tried to take it away from them, they would stand up for it."

A pro-football faction? Baker thinks such a group could rise up to save the sport—but he's not waiting to find out. Instead he's spearheading the development of a Hall of Fame Village in Canton, where football and its greatest players will be celebrated. It will have a revamped museum and sports complex, a hotel and conference center, restaurants and retail stores, a virtual-reality area and an assisted-living facility for former NFLers. All for just $500 million—and right in time for the NFL's 100th season, in 2019.

From 1996 to 2008, Baker was the commissioner of the Arena Football League, where he grew attendance, TV ratings and revenue. Two of his sons played college football, at USC and Duke. The one at USC, Sam, won 35 consecutive games and played in the NFL; the son at Duke, Ben, lost 22 straight and now works for NASCAR. Sam's wife is African-American. In the 1970s, David's father wouldn't let him bring an African-American teammate into their house in Mississippi.

The village, these grand plans—Baker says they should reinforce the lessons his sons learned through the game. "The world today is a challenging place," he says. "Children need to have some values, some toughness in them, some nobility."

They'll find all that in football, he says, as long as those who value the sport speak as loudly as its critics. "This world, with social media, is becoming more and more narcissistic," he says. "It's becoming more money-driven. Football and its values are timeless and universal.

"We need that now more than ever."

\n

WHAT IS FOOTBALL TO YOU?

FACES OF FOOTBALL

FOOTBALL IS ... the way I live

"It's taught me to fight for what I want and to speak things into existence. I've lived in my truck and been homeless for a while. Doing that but still training, watching film, not having anything to eat or anywhere to stay—that's the grind football taught me. It taught me how to keep going."

—Jerrod Black

NFL free-agent D-tackle; Dallas

FOOTBALL IS ... what makes a young man into a great man

"You can take a ninth-grader who can't walk and chew gum—and four years later you've brought him through your program ... and now he's all-state. Maybe he's not going to be a college player, but for those four years, that sense of importance and that work ethic made him into the man he's going to become."

—Dominic Saltaformaggio

Hahnville High head coach; Boutte, La.

FOOTBALL IS ... not America's sport

"Football players are overpaid. All they do is chase a ball. I go to a racetrack every Saturday night where everybody puts their hands over their hearts [during the national anthem]. Colin Kaepernick doesn't have the respect to stand for the flag people fought for, so he can have his opinion? He needs to have a what-for with somebody."

—Brandon McClure

Truck driver; Georgia

FOOTBALL IS ... a lifestyle for me

"Playing football can get me further in life. It can help me make it somewhere; I can help my family do better. It's making me get in better shape. In my opinion people should just continue playing football. It can get you out of whatever bad you're in."

—Jeremiah Halstead

Youth football player; New York City

FOOTBALL IS ... fun for other people

"I'm not a football fan, but I'm always happy to go to somebody's house to get free sandwiches. I'll scream for anything. Head injuries? They absolutely concern me. I had a head injury from an automobile accident, and they're all bad."

—Sean

Tollbooth operator; South Carolina

FOOTBALL IS ... scary for a mother

"During a game I'm standing up, I'm watching, I'm closing my eyes, I'm praying, I'm falling back.... It's a production to watch my son rip up and down the field. Every time, I get nervous. It's just like a tightening. Every game."

—Stephanie Green (far right)

Mother of a South Cobb High player; Atlanta

FOOTBALL IS ... the way I live

"My son played peewee football; he's a special needs kid. We had just moved to San Antonio. His team took him in and treated him like one of the regular kids, showed him the ropes. They showed us so much love when he started playing for them. I've been working the concessions ever since."

—Theresa

BBQ vendor; San Antonio

FOOTBALL IS ... my entire life

"I've moved everywhere because of football. As a kid I moved from Mississippi State to Auburn to LSU to West Virginia to Florida State; then I played at West Virginia and Florida State. This game has brought me all over the country, all over the world, and I wouldn't change that for anything."

—Clint Trickett

Asst. coach, E. Miss. Community College; Scooba, Miss.

FOOTBALL IS ... furious

"I'm furious because they should just be playing the game. Get back to the game and entertain us. It shouldn't be about the politics—Colin Kaepernick and all this stuff."

—Everett Miller

Provider relations representative, Comic Con 2016 attendee; New York City

FOOTBALL IS ... a moral challenge

"It's a different game when you know someone on the field. There was a kid from [my hometown] who had success at Tennessee. I managed a pool when I was younger, and he was one of the kids at the pool. Watching him as an adult, I felt guilty. I felt I'd ignored his humanity for my own enjoyment."

—Sarah Burns

Assoc. prof. of psychology, Presbyterian College; Clinton, S.C.

FOOTBALL IS ... America's favorite sport

"I used to tell my players, 'If the other guys beat you, they're gonna think they're smarter, tougher. That's embarrassing; let's make sure they don't beat us.' Fans see it the same. When their team wins, they look across the field and say, 'I'm smarter and I'm tougher because my team beat your team.'"

—Steve Spurrier

Retired football coach; Gainesville, Fla.

FOOTBALL IS ... a family thing

"I immigrated [to the U.S.] when I was 11 years old, and it was always good on Saturdays and Sundays to have that family time, shared together, watching football."

—Elson Hin

Taxi driver; Las Vegas

FOOTBALL IS ... my occupation

"Football has been good to me. People come to my establishment, wager on the game and have a very good time on half the Sundays of the year. I've always said, 'If people weren't wagering on games, the market share on the NFL would drop 40%.' People like to have something down to make a game more interesting."

—Johnny Avello

Exec. dir. of race and sports operations, Wynn Casino; Las Vegas

FOOTBALL IS ... a lot of things to a lot of people

"I've been attending Nebraska games for about 45 years, since I started going with the Boy Scouts. This sport has given me an outlet—I don't drink, and I don't smoke, but I certainly do love my Huskers."

—Gary Lothrop

Veterinarian; Lincoln, Neb.

FOOTBALL IS ... everything to me

"I retired from playing college football [at Kansas] this year due to concussions. Football taught me to take it how it is, to look forward to the next day and take advantage of what you're given."

—Jordan Shelley-Smith

Former offensive tackle; Lawrence, Kans.

FOOTBALL IS ... a brotherhood

"You connect with people from different ethnicities and backgrounds for one goal: fun. Football has helped me feel open about myself, step away from the real world and enjoy myself. Regardless of what you're going through, you can just let it out on the football field."

—Adam Plant Jr.

Defensive end, Bishop Gorman High; Las Vegas

FOOTBALL IS ... a way to bring people together

"I grew up in Dallas, raised by parents from Iran. I started playing football when I was 12. When I played football, I was in a different group of people than what I'd grown up friends with, kids from all different backgrounds. Because of football I'm cognizant of other cultures and how to work with other people. Football is so beautiful because of that."

—Tim Esfandiari

Student, Southern Methodist; Dallas

FOOTBALL IS ... violent

"I can see why America loves it so much. At the end of the day though, is it worth it? To me, it's not. I don't think the general public would even know what [NFL players] look like off the field, that the guy who is barely walking is the same guy who was killing himself for the Cowboys just days earlier."

—Jessenia Quiñones

Licensed massage therapist; Dallas

FOOTBALL IS ... hope

"It has grown me from a young man into a man, and it's given me the opportunity to teach other young men how to be grown men, how to raise their families. In the inner city of Chicago, a lot of kids don't have the basic knowledge of how to be part of a family, how to be a grown man. Football can give you that."

—Larry Williams

Teacher and football coach, Chicago Vocational High

FOOTBALL IS ... a learning tool

"A lot of guys, when they're younger, they need football to teach them skills they'll need later on in their lives. It's a game you play as a kid, a game that some very, very few lucky men continue to play. I see the same things in this game that I see in my job as a fireman—having to make and fulfill a plan, having to count on people and be accounted for."

—Steve Bouck

Fireman and rec player; Chicago

FOOTBALL IN AMERICA IS: MONS VENUS STRIP CLUB, WHERE A COLLISION OF GRIDIRON AND VICE RESULTS IN A 50% SPIKE IN BUSINESS.

FOOTBALL IN AMERICA IS: 24 STUDENTS ENROLLED IN A CLASS CALLED THE RELIGION OF SEC FOOTBALL.

FOOTBALL IN AMERICA: THE SURVEY

Is football more important than your ...

1.4% ... family?

20.1% ... job?

26.7% ... religion?

*BASED ON 212 RESPONDENTS ACROSS THE U.S.

16.3%

Percentage of respondents who can imagine a time in their life when tackle football is no longer played. Among those under 25 years old, that number was 21.4%.

FOOTBALL IN AMERICA IS: RADISHES AND BASIL AND BELL PEPPERS GROWING ORGANICALLY ON A FORMER COLLEGE FIELD.

How do your feelings about football compare with your feelings 10 years ago?

22.9% Feel worse

38.6% Feel better

38.6% Feel the same

27.9%

Percentage of respondents who think that 10 years from now the game of football will have changed dramatically. Also: 10.6% say it will very closely resemble today's game; 61.5% say it will have changed a little.

Would you let your child play tackle football?

77.5% Yes

22.5% No

"No" answers are up 7.5 percentage points from a similar SI survey two years ago. Only 68.3% of women said "yes." (Respondents without kids answered theoretically.)

11

Average age at which respondents said kids should be allowed to play tackle football. Also: 4.4% said children should never be allowed to play tackle.

FOOTBALL IN AMERICA IS: A RECREATION DEPARTMENT IN SMALL-TOWN KANSAS REPLACING ITS TACKLE LEAGUE WITH FLAG.

How has player activism—like Colin Kaepernick's kneeling during the national anthem—affected how you feel about football?

80.6% Feel the same

14.7% Like football less

4.7% Like football more

Are head injuries a serious problem in football?

94.3% Yes

5.7% No

Is the NFL taking adequate measures to protect players from head injuries?

64.7% Yes

35.3% No

(Note: 20.4% of respondents don't think the game can be made safer.)

TO READ CHAPTERS IV AND V

with stops in D.C., Las Vegas and along the West Coast

VISIT SI.COM/FIA