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Participation in youth tackle football is declining as parents seek safer alternative sports.

Flag football offers 19 times fewer head impacts than tackle football, drawing increased parental interest.

Modern youth sports trends favor fluid, less specialized, co-ed games like basketball, lacrosse, and soccer.

In America, each fall, football dominates our national psyche. The game outdraws news of an ongoing war, worsening inflation, climate degradation, and reporting on natural disasters. Political crises, economic uncertainty, waning faith in government and other key institutions, efforts to immunize against disease, and other hot-button concerns trail interest in our favorite form of entertainment—football.

Football is so thrilling, so insistently promoted on television and social media, and so geared to producing stellar athletes and their memorable performances that it attracts 150 million American fans.

Football has its feeder systems that sustain interest. These start with grade school teams and skills-building, bolstering individual bravery and teaching lessons about the value of teamwork. Football enlivens family life and supports social life, generating loyalty. The game yields up its local heroes in small towns where civic life centers on Friday night football. Colleges build their reputation on football. We easily forget which university employs this year’s Nobel Prize winner, but we’ll remember that star quarterback.

The game saturates our emotions, focuses our attention, colors our feelings about success and failure, bolsters our belief in meritocracy, makes us proud, lionizes the underdog, and draws us together—rising above (or obscuring) issues of race or class that elsewhere so divide us. Football has a lot going for it.

Week by week, local journalists and podcasters amp up enthusiasm. The Monday following, news outlets feature highlights—the last-minute game-winning touchdowns, the near-superhuman receptions, the 60-yard........

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