In a pre-Super Bowl interview on CBS’ Face The Nation, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell repeatedly refused to acknowledge a link between brain injuries and football, even as a growing amount of research is making the link between the game and the development of debilitating cognitive diseases ever clearer and perhaps even overwhelming.

CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Goodell point blank if he would acknowledge the link between football and brain injuries. Goodell demurred: “That’s why we’re investing in the research. So that we can answer the question, what is the link? What causes some of the injuries that our players are still dealing with? And we take those issues very seriously.”

Later, Goodell again ignored the question. “We’re going to let the medical individuals make those points,” Goodell said. “We’re going to give them the money, advance that science. In the meantime, we have to do everything we can to advance the game and make sure it’s safe.” The NFL, he added, has not covered up the links between concussions and brain disease. Instead, “the NFL has led the way.”

Taken together, research has formed a strong link between football and degenerative brain diseases. NFL players are four times more likely to die from Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s Disease than the general population, and recent studies have bolstered the links between football and degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which has been linked to dementia, depression, and suicide. Other studies have shown that football players perform worse on cognitive tests than non-football players.

And the NFL has hardly “led the way” into concussion research, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Malcolm Burnley showed recently in a timeline of the NFL’s response to concussions. The first chair of the league’s concussion task force, formed in 1994, regarded concussions as an “occupational hazard,” and the league rejected the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines for returning concussed players to competition in 2000. It was still publishing research skeptical of the dangers of concussions in 2005; in 2007, it still claimed that research did not show that “having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly,” even though CTE had already been found in multiple dead former football players.

That’s not a history of leading the way. That’s a history of standing in the way. The league and Goodell have plenty of reason to continue standing in the way, given that acknowledging a link between football and brain injuries, as well as the league’s role in obscuring that link in the past, would open it up to legal and medical liabilities it doesn’t want and possibly can’t afford. It would turn the discussion from one centered around how to make football safer to one centered around whether football can be made safer. And that discussion would jeopardize the $8 billion (and growing) industry that is professional football. Goodell isn’t obstinate in the face of an increasingly clear reality because no link exists. He’s obstinate because acknowledging that link would threaten the business he oversees.

Beyoncé Knowles rocked the Super Bowl halftime show last night, and, pearls clenched firmly in fist, Kathryn Jean Lopez is on it, and the national cultural decline Ms. Knowles apparently represents:

I don’t want to linger on this, but last night’s Super Bowl half-time show was ridiculous — and gratuitously so. Watching Twitter, it was really no surprise that men made comments about stripper poles and putting dollar bills through their TV sets, was it? Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy? The priceless moment was Destiny’s Child reuniting to ask that someone “put a ring on it.” As I mentioned on Twitter last night, perhaps that case might be best made in another outfit, perhaps without the crotch grabbing. It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how “proud” she is of Beyoncé. The woman is talented, has a beautiful voice, and could be a role model. And she is on some levels — on others she is an example of cultural surrender, rather than leadership.

I’d venture that there’s more dignity in Beyoncé’s marvelously controlled, rigorously choreographed performance than in Bruce Springsteen’s sloppy slide and camera crotch-bump of a few years back. And as much as her very much post-baby body was on display, Beyoncé’s performance was less allusively sexual than Prince’s silhouetted guitar. In fact, almost everything about Beyoncé’s off-stage life pretty much seems to meet Lopez’s criteria, from her long courtship with Jay-Z, to the child the two of them had once they were firmly ensconced in wedlock. If I were Lopez, I might actually think about striking the Knowles-Carters a medal for defying the Hollywood trend of shotgun or infinitely-delayed post-baby weddings.

But all of this is beside the point. What Lopez appears to object to, and what overrides for her any other consideration of ways in which Beyoncé might be a role model—including her financial success and careful control of her image— is the sight of a woman living in and very much enjoying her body, without needing to secure anyone else’s approval or ensure anyone else’s enjoyment. One of the hallmarks of Beyoncé’s lyrics, both with Destiny’s Child, and as a solo artist, is that no one is entitled to access to her. “Move, groove, prove you can hang with me / By the looks I got you shook up and scared of me,” she sang in “Bootylicious,” with its famous chorus. She warned a loutish boyfriend “Don’t you ever for a second get to thinking you’re irreplaceable.” In “Countdown,” she describes a relationship of equals, where she’ll “Do whatever that it takes, he got a winner’s mind / Give it all to him, meet him at the finish line,” and where “Yup, I buy my own, if he deserve it, buy his shit too.” And in “Independent Women,” Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child warned women “If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt / Depend on no one else to give you what you want.”

And I think that’s really what makes Lopez twitchy. In the 1994 script for Little Women, Robin Swicord wrote that “nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.” And in 2013, few things get conservatives twitchier than a woman who will take a ring from the right man—and in fact already has—but will do it because she wants it, not because she needs it.

The Super Bowl comes just once a year with its orgy of wings consumption, its highly-anticipated halftime show, the football, and the multi-million dollar ad spots. The latter are a fascinating exhibit of whatever America is thinking about gender—or what advertising executives think America is thinking about gender—at any given moment. And as is always the case, there were babes, beers, and Danica Patrick chipperly selling out the rest of her fellow women for a lot of GoDaddy’s money. But for once, it wasn’t all apocalyptically terrible. Here’s what the Super Bowl taught me about gender in 2013, from best to worst:

The Good:

1. Ladies? We’re just as capable of being passionate sports fans as men—and just as capable of being devious if we think we can snag our team an advantage. Bonus points for turning household chores into a tool of team loyalty:

2. Princesses can lead armies:

3. Real men play princess with their daughters rather than blowing them off to hang out with their bros—even if they need Doritos as incentives:

The Bad

1. Ladies: overly-attached to their mothers:

A day after the debate over the safety of football made it all the way to the White House, Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard delivered a dire prediction about the future of the NFL to CBSSports.com:

“Thirty years from now,” he said, “I don’t think it will be in existence. I could be wrong. It’s just my opinion, but I think with the direction things are going — where they [NFL rules makers] want to lighten up, and they’re throwing flags and everything else — there’s going to come a point where fans are going to get fed up with it.

“Guys are getting fined, and they’re talking about, ‘Let’s take away the strike zone’ and ‘Take the pads off’ or ‘Take the helmets off.’ It’s going to be a thing where fans aren’t going to want to watch it anymore.”

Last week, after researchers published a study further linking chronic traumatic encephalopathy to football, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates called it a death knell for football, though unlike Pollard, he predicted that death would come from the supply side:

There’s something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players–and maybe athletes at large–to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don’t know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)

After that, I don’t know how pro football can stand for long.

The irony about these two views — whether football’s death will be brought about by supply- or demand-side problems — is that if more research proves stronger links between CTE and the sport, football will likely have to choose the method of its death. The game can probably be made safe enough, by eliminating much of the padding and tackling, to keep kids playing at the youth levels. And as long as football remains a big business for colleges and the NFL, they’ll make an effort to protect players while presenting a product people will watch. The question, I think, is whether enough people will watch a game that actually protects the players.

Americans love the inherent violence of football. We love that it offers a chance to see two men larger, faster, and stronger than we’ll ever be crashing together in a moment of bone-crushing, brain-mushing gladiatorial glory. We love that “football at its finest” is a safety crushing a running back, that football’s “truest nature” is a defensive end leveling a running back so majestically that the poor sap’s helmet ends up 10 yards down the field. We hate that the NFL is trying to take that away from us, which is why every time a flag flies for a helmet-to-helmet hit, we yell that the league is “taking football out of football.”

It is becoming more and more evident that we can’t make football safer without radically changing the game itself. But the flip-side to that is that what Americans love most about football is exactly what makes it dangerous. So the NFL and the NCAA have a choice: stay dangerous, and risk kids no longer playing. Get safer, and risk creating a product that no one wants to watch. I side more with Pollard’s view than with Coates’, but either way, death seems almost certain, even if the method and the timeframe are anything but.

Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard leveled New England Patriots running back Stevan Ridley during the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s AFC Championship game, causing Ridley to fumble and leaving him motionless on the ground. That Ridley was hurt was apparent immediately when he ended up in the “fencing position” — arms and toes up to the sky:

The fumble came at a big moment. Ridley and the Patriots were down eight points with about 13 minutes to go, but the fumble gave the ball back to the Ravens, who promptly scored another touchdown and effectively sealed their trip to the Super Bowl. After the game, Ravens coach John Harbaugh called the hit “football at its finest“:

“That was the turning point of the game,” John Harbaugh said. “That was the turning point of the football game there on the 40-yard-line. It was just a tremendous hit. It was football at its finest. It was Bernard Pollard making a great physical tackle — just as good a tackle as you’re ever going to see in football right there. That just probably turned the game around right there.”

There’s no disputing the play was a turning point, and there was absolutely nothing illegal about it either. But that coaches view plays like that as football at its finest, and that players view injuries the way they say they do in Tom Junod’s excellent new Esquire piece, serves as a reminder that there is a significant gap between the concerns of people inside the game and those outside it about making it safer. If “football at its finest” involves leaving a guy motionless on the turf, I suppose I don’t have much interest in the finest points of the game.