Yesterday, Travis reported on Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard’s prediction that in 30 years, the National Football League will die because making necessary changes to improve the safety of the game will produce a sport that no one wants to watch. I think both that scenario and the one that Travis himself lays out are not unrealistic. But it’s also worth remembering that the NFL’s life or death won’t happen in a closed surgical theater. There are people other than the players and owners, and in college, the athletics programs and fundraising departments, with a vested interest in keeping football alive and immensely popular.

Significant among those interests? Broadcast television and ESPN. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the League is touting the performance of football on television. 55 percent of the television broadcasts since September 1, 2010, that averaged at least 20 million viewers were of NFL football games, or 135 out of 247 broadcasts. The next-closest program? American Idol, with 39 broadcasts, followed by the London Olympics, with 18. The first scripted program on the list is NCIS, with 11 broadcasts that hit 20 million. There’s no wonder broadcast nets pay big for the games they air: Sunday Night Football is part of what’s helped NBC rebound from fourth place to first in the ratings.

Some of that’s an indication of the increasing weakness of broadcast television, which has had a tremendously difficult time launching scripted programming that finds an audience anywhere near that large, and which has seen the numbers on big reality programs, like Idol and Dancing With The Stars decline. But that weakness means the value of football is two-fold. Football broadcasts prop up television’s advertising revenue model. And they provide a potential launching platform for new programming. That’s one of the reasons the Super Bowl rotates from network to network every year: it’s such a critically important platform for showcasing existing programming to one of the largest audiences that assembles in front of the television anymore.

And that’s just on broadcast: football’s even more important to both cable networks and the cable business model. People who oppose cable bundling frequently complain about the price of sports channels, but access to lots and lots of football is one of the reasons sports make cable seem like a good deal for the more than 100 million American households who subscribe to it. The death of football through formal dismantlement or a rising disinterest and distaste would make bundled cable television seem less valuable.

Television, in other words, badly needs the NFL to stay healthy. What that means the industry can, and will, do remains an open question. But football and television’s futures are deeply intertwined, and at a time when the content television is creating for itself is having trouble finding an audience, those ties are tighter than ever.

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.

Last spring, Gov. Mark Dayton (D-MN) and the Minnesota state legislature exploited a legal loophole to approve $348 million in public financing to help build a new stadium for the state’s National Football League franchise, the Minnesota Vikings. The majority of the state’s financing of the stadium would come from revenues gained from new electronic gambling machines placed in bars and restaurants — an idea that seemed fool-proof to Dayton and legislators since Minnesota ranks among the biggest states in charitable gaming.

Less than a year later, revenues from the electronic pull-tab machines are falling far short of projections, and even before ground has been broken on the new stadium, it already looks like a bad deal for Minnesota taxpayers. New financial projections say the revenue from gambling has come in below both monthly and daily targets, and the amount of cash on hand has been cut in half, Minnesota Public Radio reports:

Revenues since pull-tabs started on Sept. 18 have fallen far short of the $100 million monthly target experts initially set for the games. Last month, disappointing revenues prompted state finance officials to cut the expected stadium cash they’d have on hand by half.

The most current data from the Minnesota Gambling Control Board show Minnesotans only played a total of $4.1 million worth of the games through the end of 2012. [...]

The existing machines each are grossing $180 a day — again short of the projected $225 daily take — grossing less per day than the experts’ projection made when the stadium financing plan was being worked on last spring.

State officials now project the pull tabs will generate just $47 million in revenue, barely more than half original estimates. Pull tab revenues for 2012 were down 51 percent compared to projections. Minnesota officials and stadium advocates argue that the shortfall is a result of too-slow approval for the new machines. As of December, 75 bars and restaurants had been approved to host the machines, short of the 300 that would have been idea by that time, advocates told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. The more likely explanation, though, is that the plan was a bad one.

Across the country, taxpayers are footing the bills for stadiums to the tune of $4 billion a year. Cities and states have used a host of public financing tactics, but the result is near-universal: revenue from such schemes falls short of projections, the city and state that financed the stadium are left with a shortfall and without the promised economic boom, and taxpayers eventually pick up the tab, whether through higher taxes or cuts to government services.

Usually, hard evidence that stadiums and arenas are boondoggles doesn’t emerge for at least a few years. In Minneapolis, it became obvious before construction crews even broke ground.