In September, as the summer heat dissipates into the cool autumn air, weekends in America take on a little more intensity and excitement. At the beginning of the weekend, high school fields glow under the Friday night lights as the emerging generation is introduced to a longstanding American tradition. On Saturday, college campuses across the country roar in support of their teams, whether they are underdogs or favorites. And as the weekend comes to a close, the living room is more than just another room in the house; it becomes a space of shared sorrow and jubilation as families cheer on their favorite NFL teams through wins and losses. 

Football is not just another American commodity; it is a cultural symbol embedded in the nation’s very fabric. Unlike the English-derived soccer, Canadian-originating basketball, or other sports that originate outside the United States, football is a uniquely American invention. It took rugby and made it faster and more dynamic. 

Football mirrors the American story itself. The United States did not merely inherit institutions and technology; it redefined and invented them. The Constitution was an institutional innovation. With the telegraph, information no longer traveled at the speed of a horse, but at the speed of electricity. The plane cut the time from New York City to San Francisco from 84 hours to five hours. The assembly line gave every American an automobile, and the iPhone gave every American a camera, a telephone, and a web browser in one product that could fit in their pocket. Football gave America a pastime for people of all backgrounds to enjoy.

Take away football, and you take away a source of enjoyment for millions, and a source of income for coaches, administrators, and players at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels. To suggest that football is a net negative on the American cultural landscape fails to take into account the totality of its impact. As with anything culturally relevant, there are aspects of it to criticize. However, the benefits that football provides to American society, including its cultural impact and job creation, vastly outweigh any costs. Even then, the costs of football are grossly overstated by critics of the sport. 

Critics argue that football’s violent nature undermines its cultural legitimacy. Here, criticism deserves attention. It is true that lifelong injuries, the worst among them being traumatic brain injuries, are endemic to such a physical sport. But this fact is not something leagues are overlooking, and pioneers in sports science have taken action to address these issues. Rule changes, especially regarding head-to-head contact, have been shown to reduce head injuries by 38%. The introduction of guardian caps, soft padding that goes over players’ helmets, has led to a 54% to 62% reduction in practice concussions; while the exact mechanism of reduction isn’t yet fully known, research is promising. Total league-wide concussions are down 17% from the 2024 season and 12% from the 2021-2023 seasons.

American football has one of the highest injury rates among all sports, at 4.36 injuries per 1,000 athlete exposures. However, sports like freestyle skiing and ice hockey have higher injury rates of 6.38 and 5.93-15.6 per 1,000 athlete exposures, respectively, yet there isn’t so much of a fuss around these sports. Ice hockey allows players to actively box each other in the middle of games!

Perhaps the pushback against football is more a bout of cultural contrarianism than it is prudential criticism of the sport. It is the most popular sport in America and is especially influential among young men. I doubt that critics of football are genuinely concerned about players’ well-being. Rather, they use the prevalence of injuries in football as an excuse to criticize an aesthetic — one representative of American rugged persistence and unity — they don’t like. It is no surprise that cultural contrarians will find a way to lament a sport that inspires excitement in young men, brings families together across the United States, and represents the country as a whole. 

When September returns and the Friday night lights flicker back on, the defining American sport will resume. Helmets will clash, receivers will make spectacular catches, and the cultural contrarian will sit afar, criticizing the sport representative of America. Yet, the cultural contrarian who laments the sport’s physicality is often the one who enjoys the very communal spectacle they assail. Football’s opponents will speak of risk as though it were foreign to American life, as though nobody had put themselves on the line for the sake of something greater. But America was not built on those who fled from risks or avoided impact. It was built by those who accepted it and laced up anyway.