Whither Football?

To witness the death of the multi-billion dollar National Football League, you really don't need to see sportswriters wringing their hands over the moral dilemma of covering America's Roman circus of brain trauma.

And you don't need to watch multi-millionaire football stars, pampered for most of their lives, ostentatiously disrespecting the American national anthem, kneeling, their raised fists in the air.

You don't need to see the desperation in the NFL's television commercials: actresses in team gear, holding snack trays to feed their (virtual) extended team-gear-wearing families, as the NFL begs middle-class women to mother their game before it dies.

You don't have to do any of that to see how football is dying.

All you have to do is go out to a youth football field, as I did on Sunday morning, and talk to parents and coaches.

"Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level," says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.

"And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one."

Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end who committed suicide in April while serving a life sentence for murder, was found to have a severe form of C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma that has been found in more than 100 former N.F.L. players.

Researchers who examined the brain determined it was “the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron’s age,” said a lawyer for Hernandez in announcing the result at a news conference on Thursday. Hernandez was 27.

Since most teams already stay away from padded practices, the next challenge will be for minor league teams to change their approach to coaching amateur athletes, Evraire said.

"You can't go to the trump card of we lost the game on Saturday so next time we practice we're going to scrimmage and knock the snot out of each other so we can figure things out. That's not how it's done," he said.

"You've got to step back, look at the strategy, look at the scheme, look at what's gone wrong and coach these athletes up physically, but more importantly, mentally aware of what they need to do to be successful in the next game."