The Influence Of American Football On Education

American football is the most iconic sport of the United States. It originated in American colleges and universities, with the first official game on November 6, 1869, between the two college teams Rutgers and Princeton. As of 2012, nearly 1.1 million high school athletes and 70,000 college athletes play the sport in the United States annually. The National Football League has the highest average attendance out of all the sports leagues worldwide. However, this highly revered sport comes with many detriments. American football should be banned due to its immense injury rates and its negative impact on education. What if 1 in 100,000 participants of a sport died every year? This is true in the case of American football. The University of North

For instance, in New England, Williams College charges $41,434 in annual tuition, which adjusted with inflation is 3.2 times what the tuition was 30 years ago. In the same vein, USC’s current tuition is $41,022, 3.6 times what it was in 1980. You may wonder where all of this increasing revenue is going, and the answer is that it is being sucked into American football. Currently, 629 US colleges have football teams, and only 14 of those colleges make money from American football. While people could argue that alumni donations increase during a school’s winning season, those donations are mostly designated to the same school’s athletic program, leaving the general education programs in shambles. Students now have to pay more, simply for a better football program, while College academic programs do not benefit. In some instances, colleges might even cut funding for more academic oriented parts of the school to further aid in the funding of their football programs. Others might argue that the increased funding is being used to subsidize students, and not the sport itself, but NCAA data show that only 16.2 percent of the spending in Division 1 schools with football goes to student aid. American football does not benefit education sufficiently to outweigh the costs of the

First of all, it is called American football, and so the name itself implies a disparity. Also, nearly every other of the 196 in the world play soccer as their national sport. To counter any arguments about team spirit, or national pride, you could look at any other country which shows the same level of enthusiasm in soccer. Soccer can too offer individuals the opportunity to break out from poverty. Dealing with injury, according to the NCAA, there were no deaths in college soccer in the last 5 years, and soccer athletes have a lower chance of receiving concussions and brain disease than in American football. Another benefit of soccer over American football is that it takes less overall funding to have a soccer team than a football team. Although replacing American football with soccer would diminish injury rates and funding issues, it would be a large step in the right direction. American football should be banned due to its immense injury rates and its negative impact on