Where is football heading? Bad news, NFL.

And this, from ESPN's Kevin Seifert, on the most obvious ramification of the growing concussion fear among actual players at the NFL (and to a lesser extent college) level - who is it who will continue to play football even when your long term viability as a human being comes into question when you play it?

The same people who still go into boxing. The young men with nothing to lose.

Malcolm Barnwell calls it the coming "ghettoization of football". If you're from middle or upper class stock, and you have other ways of making a good living available to you? HELL, no, you don't go into boxing, and HELL NO, you won't go into football pretty soon. But if you're from the ghetto? And you know the only way to money is either drug dealing or football? Where do I sign up?

And, football as an industry needs to take a hard look at what's happened to boxing in the last thirty years or so (and it took much less to get to this point). When I was a kid, forty years ago, Muhammed Ali was the baddest dude on the planet. Name the current heavyweight champ. You can't, can you? Only a select few give a crap, and only a very few fights bring anything even slightly resembling the attention that major fights used to. (Will Mayweather/Paciao? I don't know. But I can't name the last one.)

That's what football has to look forward to. Not death, but something worse. 

Insignificance.