Will talent decline?

While there are a couple of other interesting developments in sports (e.g. the significant poll results for the Olympic candidacy of Munich or the new betting scandal in Austrian professional Football (which might be just the tip of an iceberg)) I have to - finally - continue my blog by discussing the recent news on the decline of Pop Warner Football in the US.

As many news agencies report, Pop Warner participation has declined nearly 10 percent over the last three years. This is significant and substantial and some commentators have raised the question: Is the future quality of (Professional) Football in the US in danger? Before all European Football teams start celebrating and expect to beat US teams 10 or 20 years down the road, we have to take a closer look.

Pop Warner Football is a possible gate to a live or career in Football. From there on, the way can potentially lead through high school football, collegiate football to the promised land of the highest level of pro football, the NFL. Or any other professional league that offers considerable salaries and career opportunities. So if talent on the first talent pool - and this is the main argument of those who raised their warning voices - declines, we will eventually see a trickle-down effect which will endanger the quality of the game and players in the NFL.

The whole argument is certainly not far-fetched, as Football - like anything where certain skills are needed - needs institutions that teach those specific skills to the players. In one of our paper (Böheim and Lackner, 2012), we show that Football involves education like any other profession does. And it yields comparable returns if you analyze the in terms of additional entry-wages per year spent in college football. So if education on early stages is eroding, it is reasonable to conclude that the specific skills needed to play football at the highest level will eventually become scarce. But how big of a problem will this really be? Considering the fact that the maximum time to stay in the NCAA Football system is limited to 5 years (with 1 year of little participation at all), it might be something felt by NFL times as players might enter the league with a lower skill-set than in previous decades.

But what should really change? The career possibilities as well as the potential earnings for a player in the NFL are still very intriguing. True, careers in Football are shorter than those in other major leagues, but the NFL still is on the top of all professional leagues in terms of (worldwide) popularity, the amount of money and salaries involved and the general product that it offers. If the decline of Pop Warner Football does indeed damage the extremely high popularity of the NFL and its product, I could imagine that the current development is quite dangerous. But if the fish does not stink from the head downwards, the incentives to acquire the necessary skills will be there and the inflow of talent will not be endangered. NFL teams and NCAA programs, however, might have to adjust their way of further developing their prospect players' talent as they might need more additional training.


The whole discussion comes at a time, where the NFL has to deal with serious problems in terms of long-term health consequences of Football. A number of tragic cases of former players who were suffering from concussion-related long-term health issues and committed suicide, has revealed a substantial problem for the NFL. This is a big threat to the league and the popularity of the sport. It certainly also plays a major role in the decline of Pop Warner as parents will be reluctant to allow their kids to participate in a sport they perceive as highly dangerous. And this is the area where the NFL has to put most effort in. If they manage to make Football safe and deal with the past of neglected health consequences, the future of the NFL is as bright as ever and eventually kids will return to Pop Warner.

Bounty hunters?

Quite recently a potentially big scandal shook up the "pre-Draft" NFL. Accusations surfaced that now Ex-New Orleans Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams used to run illegal (under NFL rules) pay for performance schemes when he was with the Saints (2009-11), the Redskins and probably the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills earlier in his career. Some former players came forward and described Williams' system as some sort of "bounty program" where hard hits and injuries of opponents where awarded extra money.

Former Titans and 49ers Safety Lance Schulters is cited by the Tennesseasn newspaper as follows:

“Guys would throw out there, ‘Hey, knock this guy out and it’s worth $1,000,’ ” Schulters said. “Let’s say when we played the Steelers, and Hines Ward was always trying to knock guys out. So if you knocked (him) out, there might be something in the pot, $100 or whatever, for a big hit on Hines — a legal, big hit."

He went on saying:

"A player scoring a touchdown might receive $500 from a pool, a defensive lineman with a sack might get $200 and a 100-yard rusher might be handed $1,000. Special teams players would get a bonus for a downing a punt inside the 10, and offensive linemen could expect to be handed extra cash for not giving up a sack. Sometimes the bonuses could be as much as $5,000." 

So we have two essentially different things: One is a clear incentive to injure and harm opponents and the other is basically extra financial compensation for making perfectly legal plays and performing well.

So let us turn our intention to the incentives to get opponents injured. Is this really something new or illegal? Every defender in the NFL or in other levels of football knows that knocking out any starter on the offense of the opponent will substantially increase the probability to win the game. Of course defenders will try to hit the opposing Quarterback as hard as possible and if he is on the sideline nobody will feel bad about it. And as long as the hits were legal it will (and should not) have any negative consequences. When Jay Cuttler (Chicago Bears) went down in the NFC Championship game last year against Green Bay, the chances of the Packers to win the game increase dramatically. I doubt that it needed any extra incentives for Green Bay defenders to go after Cuttler as hard as possible. So why make too much out of this new story?

But let us turn to the second Schulters quote. What he is saying is that there was systematic extra compensation for making plays on defense and offense.  $1.000 for a 100-yards rusher, $500 for a TD catch and a mere $200 for a sack. Should we really care for this at all? When we talk about  $1.000 for a 100 yards rusher we usually talk about an athlete earning a million dollars base salary, having a contract usually involving performances bonuses anyway and (more often than not) being a multi millionaire. The same is true for Wide Receivers who catch TDs and defenders who get to the QB. Performance will always be rewarded in professional sports. So what is an extra $200 for a linemen who earns thousands of dollars for each game anyway? What kind of an extra incentive is that? I say it is pretty much irrelevant. And as long as performance incentives are part of regular NFL contracts it just another way of rewarding (perfectly legal) performances.

We are either seeing just the tip of an iceberg right now, or this story is blown out of proportion already. Even if we condemn Gregg Williams' ways of coaching we could still say that it probably has not worked out anyway. The New Orleans Saints' defense has not really done well in recent years, culminating in a rather bad 2011 season. This ultimately got Williams fired. His approach failed, but was it really that "bad" after all? We will probably have to think about this as soon as the NFL has issued the penalty...