To this day, only the 1969 Moon landing has drawn more American eyeballs than the Super Bowl, with the 57th set to be played between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night. Now, though, the old college teams want to attract the eyeballs too, together with the billions in advertising revenue they inevitably bring. In practice, that means marketers, and trainers, and wages, and the end of an amateur tradition that’s survived, in one form or another, since the end of the Civil War.

This matters, and not merely in the way it transforms college football into a disfigured, commercialized echo of the NFL. For in the professionalization of university sport, there’s a broader story too. I mean how, in modern America, money burrows into every facet of life, a process that squashes the variety from our continent-wide culture — even as it hints at the hard limits of our big-is-best mentality.

Americans love competition. Every year, 100 million of us attend a professional baseball, football, hockey or basketball game. Yet in this sports-crazed republic, amateur college football is distinct — not least in the passion of its fans. In 2024, the 10 highest-rated games had a collective TV viewership of 122 million, while 31 teams averaged a remarkable 100% in-person attendance rate. Yet even these numbers don’t really do the sport justice. Visit somewhere like the University of Alabama and you’ll soon see what I mean. Starting at breakfast, 100,000 fans get stuffed and buzzed at “tailgate” parties outside the ground. Expect an orgy of beer, hickory-fired ribs and Krispy Kreme donuts. Once you’re good and full, dash into the “Walk of Champions”, where fans greet the team as they enter Bryant-Denny Stadium. You’ve already had a packed day, and it is not even kickoff.

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How, then, to explain this mania, one that fires spasms of emotion from Alaska to Maine? For Kurt Kemper, the answer begins less with the teams — and more with the universities that host them. “College, to Americans, is synonymous with the middle class,” argues Kemper, a professor of American history at Dakota State University. “College football is an idealized part of the college experience.” That’s partly a function of history. Rutgers played Princeton in the first-ever college football game way back in 1869. Today, though, college football is mostly a working-class game, one particularly popular among African-Americans. It doubtless helps, Kemper adds, that university, and university football, have long been admired as engines of social mobility. Compared to their classmates, football stars disproportionately hail from disadvantaged backgrounds, and graduate at higher rates than average.

In the end, though, college football is about more than a path to a picket fence. As Randy Roberts, a Purdue University historian explains, the institution ultimately speaks to America’s bewildering range of regional identities. Who you root for doesn’t just denote your alma mater: but rather your local sensibility and class. Forget those Alabama ribs — at Presbyterian College, in South Carolina, the team mascot is a Scottish highlander, blasting the bagpipes as he leads the team on. In America’s heartland, meanwhile, teams are famed for embracing the Midwest’s agricultural heritage. In Wisconsin, for instance, fans wear cheese hats on their heads, appropriate enough in the Dairy State. In Nebraska, for its part, supporters swap camembert for corn. Little wonder their team is nicknamed the Cornhuskers.

I don’t wish to insult readers in Madison or Lincoln — but this regional spirit is undoubtedly clearest at Appalachian State University. Nestled amid the hills and hollers of Boone, a hardscrabble town in North Carolina’s High Country, App State boasts the highest average attendance percentage in college football: a spectacular 115.78%. To zoom past capacity, students cram onto the “Grassy Hill” overlooking the field. They’re joined by 25,000 alums, who drive hours down treacherous two-lane highways to return “home” for six Saturdays every fall. Between the third and fourth quarter, millionaires, college kids, and working-class locals all celebrate their rough-hewn identity through a 35,000-person sing-along of an iconic rock-country anthem.

For Adam Cole, none of this is surprising. “Maybe you love your hometown, maybe you hate it,” says the beat reporter covering college football in the southeast. “But it sticks with you.” It’s a love that can easily veer into hatred. A case in point is when the University of Michigan plays their next door neighbor and Big Ten nemesis Ohio State University, in a matchup ominously known as “The Game”. In one recent meeting, the players started a melee, a battle complete with pepper spray. He’s never got quite that angry, but Cole understands the red mist himself. A native of Topeka, Kansas, he once overheard a passenger at an airport insult a local university. As he puts it: “It took everything in me not to say, ‘Hey fucker, don’t talk about my town!’”

Now, though, this lively amateurism is threatened — by the mighty greenback. Already, the top 10 grossing college football programs collectively earn $571 million a year, largely through free media exposure when big games are shown on TV. It’s a bonanza that smaller teams can sometimes grasp at too. In 2007, for instance, Appalachian State shocked the college football world by defeating the University of Michigan. Practically overnight, enrollment jumped by 6,000. No wonder Joey Jones, the Appalachian State football team’s director of strategic communications, calls college football the “front porch” of his university.

With figures like these floating about, it’s equally unsurprising that cash now stalks other corners of college football too. For decades, student-athletes were mostly unpaid. All they could expect was paid tuition and a tiny dorm room, alongside drab cafeteria meals. But, in 2015, federal courts finally cut students in on the action. These days, college athletes secure compensation via “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL) deals. By appearing in commercials, or signing a jersey, a top-flight college quarterback can earn $1 million a year; elite teams altogether cost upwards of $10 million. All the while, universities increasingly employ “general managers” to raise money from wealthy donors and ink deals with the private sector.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Since the launch of an NFL-style playoff competition, in 2014, a system that’s since expanded to 12 teams, the biggest universities together gorge on media deals together worth $7.8 billion. And with a gaggle of lesser schools keen to get in on the action, the top sides have fought to control their monopoly by forming into 11 mega-conferences. Strikingly, these groupings no longer correspond by region: the Big Ten has transcended its Midwestern roots to encompass 20 schools, spanning from Jersey to Cali, securing it a media footprint in five of the nation’s seven biggest markets.

With so many potential viewers, the Big Ten TV network fills the coffers of its members with $100 million a year. Yet if that makes general managers rich, and ensures students are fairly remunerated, it’s also having a real impact on how college football actually feels from the stands. One good example — you might almost call it NFL-lite — came last month. One chilly Monday evening, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame played the Ohio State Buckeyes in what’s increasingly known as the “Super Bowl” of college football. Each team bagged a cool $20 million from the game, but beyond the dollars and cents, the professionalization practically oozed from the touchline. Players and coaches are hired guns who move from team to team in search of greater pay. Will Howard, Ohio’s winning quarterback, had just transferred from Kansas State the previous January. Days after Ohio State’s victory, the team’s defensive coordinator jumped ship to Pennsylvania State, lured by an annual paycheck worth $3.2 million.

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It goes without saying, meanwhile, that those mega-conferences are bringing their own changes. “Conferences are losing college football’s parochialism,” says Roberts, adding that the passion animating games like the Ole Miss-Mississippi State “Egg Bowl” is ultimately down to the narcissism of small differences. Kemper agrees. Until the inception of the college football playoff, he suggests that crowning a national champion wasn’t really the sport’s primary aim. Rather, beating a rival defined a “winning” season. Nowadays, though, with teams duking it out for a national trophy, college football risks becoming a clinical, antiseptic game, one devoid of the parochial hatreds learned at your grandfather’s knee.

Of course, this heady blend of nationalization and money isn’t limited to college football. Post-1945 America has been standardized by transport and telecoms, which together flatten regional accents, dump regional foods, and altogether homogenize the American experience. As late as the Carter presidency, you could visit Nebraska to watch the Cornhuskers, munching a runza from a dairy bar as you went. No longer, even as Kemper argues that the arrival of a winner-takes-all college Super Bowl speaks to a broader economic model that lavishes rewards upon a select few. “In the old system,” he says, “10-15 teams finished a season feeling like a winner. In the new system there is one winner.”

To be fair, greed has yet to fully crush the college game. “Tough people who work with their hands and football is their way out,” is how Roberts characterizes it. “Football is a tough game. You see where the players are from.” At Appalachian State, certainly, that toughness is epitomized by quarterback Chase Brice. Failing to achieve on-field success at two bigger schools, the burly blonde transferred here in 2021. Self-effacing and eager for success, Jones says that the mountain people here “saw something of themselves” in the 27-year-old Georgian.

That’s just as well — for college football can still be special. On 7 September, 2022, Appalachian State hosted ESPN’s College GameDay show. Broadcast live from the university’s campus, it brought the university $500 million dollars in free advertising. Not that the fans cared much about that, as tiny Boone became the center of the football universe. A back-and-forth game against a conference rival came down to one final play. Behind two points, with two seconds remaining, Brice heaved a 53-yard “Hail Mary” touchdown for a remarkable victory. The crowd exploded. Yet amid the mayhem, Brice, the star quarterback on the national stage, ran straight past reporters. Instead, he rushed to the student section of the stands, where he helped classmates climb down onto the field. A wonderfully intimate moment, amid a sport that grows and grows.

But rewatching the play in 2017 – watching all 288 pounds of Giants lineman Leonard Marshall take the Montana hard to the earth – I’m focused on the crown of Marshall’s helmet hitting the back of Montana’s helmet. I’m watching the mask of Montana’s helmet dive into the ground so hard it resurfaces thick with mud.

I wonder what the doctor didn’t diagnose that day.

All sports involve risk to the body. When we play them we exert our bodies beyond what’s necessary and that’s an inherently risky choice. But the odds of sustaining a catastrophic shoulder injury driving a long par four are infinitesimally small and tolerable. The chances of a career runner pulling a hamstring are high, but still tolerable: No one’s ever died of a pulled hamstring.

We now know that the head hits and concussions suffered playing gridiron football cause devastating brain injuries. We don’t know the odds of those injuries becoming Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), but because collisions are a part of regular gameplay and not the exception to it, the risk of exposure to brain injury is 100%.

The question has progressed beyond ‘How much risk of CTE is tolerable?’ to ‘How much CTE is tolerable?’.

Football is America’s game, deeply. It’s rural and it’s urban. It’s timeworn college rivalries and threadbare jerseys passed down paternal lines. It’s ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘hook-and-ladder’ and ‘flea-flicker’. Football is Budweiser and bonfires. The NFL is Thanksgiving.

But what if it wasn’t: Would we make football all over again? Would fathers pass it on to their sons? As the league eyes UK expansion, these questions are no longer hypothetical.

The flags went up months ago. Oxford Circus was festooned with them. Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks and navy banners announcing that the NFL would be invading Regent Street with the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders, a bandstand and free face-painting.

It’s been ten years since America’s football league began staging games in London – not just exhibition games, but regular season matches. There are consistent murmurs of introducing a London franchise, a credit to the country’s world-class stadiums. The objections to a UK-based team are numerous (the fans, the jetlag, the taxes!), but NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell appears intent on crossing the Atlantic: a European merch shop and a UK-specific NFL site are both up-and running, the UK has its own fantasy football site, and, this year, the league’s diaspora spilled beyond Wembley. The Cleveland Browns played the Minnesota Vikings in a nearly sold-out Twickenham Stadium on the last Sunday in October.

Expansion isn’t easy work, but it’s happening: four games a year on British soil, 3 million UK fans watching from the stands or from their couches with televisions tuned to the BBC. Judith Ineson is the Director of Business Development for Kent-based American Football Development, a three-year-old company teaching people how to play the foreign game. She credits the NFL with raising consciousness about the sport: “People naturally want to try this game they’ve seen on TV.” In the last year, AFD has seen 10,000 children under 18 run through their football programmes, which range from non-contact flag football to full-contact football. They’ve taught kids as young as four.

The British American Football Association – the governing body for gridiron football in the UK – has another three school initiatives in place, including football being added to the £280 million School Games programme managed by the Youth Sports Trust for the first time this year.

BAFA then partners with NFL UK, which runs even more programmes for school-aged kids. Players from the LA Rams have been Skyped into London schools to teach kids about California, about teamwork, and, of course, about how to play gridiron football. This year, Michelle Obama’s Play 60 and the annual Summer Bowl for London schools will be joined by NFL Flag presented by Subway: a 12-week football curriculum for kids ages 9-12, funded by a national appetite for Chicken Tikka footlongs.

Because part of the NFL’s expansion plan is to show Britain that American football is already more British than they realise. The NFL UK’s website is well-stocked with promotional videos highlighting players with sometimes tenuous ties, like the Oakland Raiders’ Obi Melifonwu, who was born in London, but moved to the US at the age of 3. And there’s the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jay Ajayi, who moved to the US at the age of 7.

It’s one reason why David Tossell, the Director of Public Affairs for NFL UK, is so psyched about rugby’s Alex Gray taking up gridiron football, an athlete raised in England and currently playing tight end for the Atlanta Falcons: “It’s great to have people like him who can say, I was a rugby player six months ago and you’ve been playing [American football] since you were young, and look at me, I’m in the NFL now.”

Watching gridiron football is making kids want to get outside and play it – that’s why demand for these school programmes exist. But the street runs both ways; in fact, the NFL’s bottom line is counting on it.

“The more children you can touch, the more fans you can create,” says Tossell. “There’s probably no more effective way of creating fans than getting a ball in their hands.”

In his book The Truth Doesn’t Have a Side, Dr Bennet Omalu – the doctor who discovered CTE – describes a trip he took before the disease was a household acronym:

“During my research into CTE while writing my first paper, I watched high school teams practice. In those practices, young men lined up opposite each other and threw themselves into each other. The loud, clacking sound of plastic helmets hitting each other echoed across the field. Such was not an unusual sound. It is football.”

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease not unlike Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. It involves the abnormal accumulation of protein – in this case, Tau protein – in the brain, which leads to selective degeneration. The brain regions affected first are the frontal lobes, which are important for regulating behaviour, inhibiting inappropriate behaviour, and multitasking. There’s no test for diagnosing CTE that can be conducted without dissecting a patient’s brain, so there’s no way to say for sure whether someone suffered from CTE until they’re already dead.

In some sense, a living person can’t have CTE. They can only think they have it, fret about the things they’ve done across their lives that may have caused it.

And the only thing that every person so far diagnosed with CTE has had in common is a history of repetitive hits to the head. Not concussions. Head hits. The loud, clacking sound of plastic helmets hitting each other echoed across the field. That’s the sound of football.

In the years since Dr Omalu’s first book, Play Hard, Die Young: Football Dementia, Depression, and Death, and in large part because of the 2015 film Concussion it inspired, the NFL has been dogged by news stories linking CTE to America’s game.

This past July, for example, the Boston University Brain Bank published a study of 111 former pro-football players whose families believed they’d witnessed the behavioural markers of CTE: memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, aggression, depression, and, sometimes, suicidal behaviour. Scientists posthumously diagnosed CTE in 110. In other words, 99% of those families were right.

Then in September, the league was sued over the death a former player. Aaron Hernandez played for the New England Patriots for three seasons before he signed a $40 million contract in 2012. Ten months later, he was arrested for murder and, at 25, sentenced to life in prison without parole. In April 2017, Hernandez killed himself in his prison cell. Researchers found he suffered from a severe case of CTE, and his family filed suit – a suit that spokesperson Joe Lockhart announced the NFL would fight “vigorously”.

Just last week another suit was filed, this time a class action against California’s Pop Warner Little Scholars, a youth football league. The named plaintiffs are the mothers of two players who died far from the field, but whose autopsies confirmed CTE. One’s son died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 24, the second died of suicide at 25.

Dr Omalu predicts more litigation will come, then criminal trials. “Playing football is child abuse,” he tells me. “Mark my words, in the next 5 or 10 years, a district attorney will file a lawsuit against the parents of a child who’s been injured playing football. Mark my words.”

But in England, youth gridiron football is just ratcheting up. “We are really pleased to have supported British American Football into the School Games,” said Ali Oliver, the chief executive of the UK’s Youth Sport Trust, by email. He says the sport was added to the curriculum this year, in part, because it was already taking off. And while the School Games iteration of football doesn’t involve contact play, that’s certainly where BAFA hopes it’s headed. Indeed, their national strategy document laying out the plan for the expansion of gridiron football in Britain is called “From School Yard to Super Bowl.” (BAFA declined several requests to be interviewed for this article.)

British children are allowed to play full contact football from the age of 14. This is the version of the game they see on TV: with helmets and shoulder pads and hitting. Some people call it tackle football. Judith Ineson, the AFD spokesperson, calls it “padded football.”

According to Tossell, the fastest growing level of play in the UK is university play, which means the fastest growing type of football is tackle football. Since 2013, gridiron football results have been counted towards a university’s BUCS score, another sign the sport is making itself at home.

Accordingly, organizations like BAFA are starting to highlight its risks, if only the bare minimum. This year it introduced a concussion protocol that includes mention of CTE and a pocket-guide on how to spot a concussion, but avoids mention of what newer science is revealing about the sub-concussive head hits a team doctor can’t diagnose.

“It’s not concussions that cause CTE,” says Dr Jesse Mez, the lead author on the Brain Bank study that found CTE in 99% of its subjects. “It’s the repetitive hits. It doesn’t make sense that a symptomatic concussion could lead to this. The important point we’re trying to make is it’s not just concussions.”

A recent Stanford University study found that university players at the position of offensive lineman endure about 62 of these sub-concussive head hits – each of which replicates the trauma of a car collision occurring at 30 mph – in a single game. To give an idea of how many head hits a player can expect to endure in a single year: the UK university-level regular season is eight games long, plus postseason play and practice.

And for British players to be competitive, careers will need to start earlier than university. David Tossell says the league wants to be “working with the players to help them find a pathway into the NFL. Try to identify them from an early age, get them into a US high school or college.”

But US high school starts at 14, and by that time a kid growing up in New York or Florida will have been playing full contact football for nine years. It’s easy to imagine that, as UK play develops, the age British children begin playing full-contact football will lower. The mothers in the class action lawsuit against the youth football league in California – which has yet to be decided – both enrolled their sons in contact football when they were about 8. In San Antonio, parents can sign their kids up for the “tiny-mite” division from the age of 5.

“We don’t know the exact relationship about how much football produces CTE, but we know the connection is really strong,” says Mez. “And when we see those who play earlier, before 12, the cognition is worse: in the imaging studies, the brain structures – the white matter tracts – look more impaired.”

“By the time a child is 15, he’s played for 10 years. There’s a cumulative effect,” says Dr Omalu, evangelical on this point. “There’s been thousands of hits. If you want to do good for your child, don’t let them play football. You wouldn’t give them cigarettes to smoke, you don’t give them a bottle of Johnnie Walker, you don’t give them cocaine.” He pauses.

“But what’s worse: smoking a cigarette or a concussion?”

Gridiron football in the US is a sport that became an industry that created a whole network of related industries and reliance interests. A professional team carries 53 players plus a five player practice squad, about 15 coaches, a back office, not to mention doctors, cheerleaders, stadium staff. They employ outside vendors to drive buses, to do laundry, to provide catering.

Now multiply that by a league of 32 teams. Add college football and high school football and Pop Warner. Add the people who make helmets and the people who design them and the people who study them. Add Nike and Budweiser and Coors and every other company that makes money off the back of football. Over 110 million Americans watched the Super Bowl this year, and the programme sold adverts at a cost of $166,667 per second. It’s not hard to understand why gridiron football persists relatively unchanged, in spite of the known risks to players’ health.

But the pull of the sport is still stronger than money. Gridiron football is scholarships to university, something for kids to focus on after school lets out. It’s lessons in teamwork and losing and dedication. It’s character-building and, as Britain is finding out, it’s fun.

And CTE is by no means linked exclusively to gridiron football. When I asked Judith Ineson about the subject, she pointed to rugby. So did David Tossell: “From a safety point of view, it’s no different than rugby. All sports – rugby and soccer and everyone else – are conscious of safety.”

But it’s not like rugby, in more ways than one. Gridiron football is still finding its feet in the UK. It’s still a sport rather than an industry. It’s an activity rather than a heritage. Ask retired US pros if they would play football again and many, even players anxious that they’re already symptomatic like Redskins wide receiver Santana Moss, say yes. They loved the game enough. Pro Bowler Bo Jackson is one of a growing number who feels differently: “I would have never played football. Never. I wish I had known about all of those head injuries, but no one knew that. And the people that did know that, they wouldn’t tell anybody.”

Leonard Marshall – the player remembered best for that punishing blow he landed on Joe Montana in the 1990 NFC Championship Game – has been even more outspoken. This May, at a press conference for the Concussion Legacy Program, he pledged to donate his brain to science.

“CTE is no joke and I don’t want to see anyone else suffer like me and my friends,” Marshall said at the time. “At 55, I have short-term memory loss, erratic behavior, and experience fogginess. This is literally a life-and-death matter, and it’s time we start having real, honest conversations about brain trauma in professional and youth sports.”

Many suspect that if we knew about CTE, we wouldn’t make football all over again. NFL viewership is in decline in the US; so is participation in youth leagues. More mothers are refusing to drop their kids off at practice, fewer fathers are passing it down to their sons. The loud, clacking sound of plastic helmets hitting each other seems to be growing quieter. But as the domestic audience shrinks, the NFL is expanding elsewhere: inking TV deals with the BBC and, more worryingly, passing through the UK’s school yard gates.

Gridiron football has always marketed itself as America’s game. It’s tradition. It’s ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘hook-and-ladder’ and, now, ‘concussion protocol.’ It’s its own language.  

The first test of the NFL’s durability abroad will be whether it can convince a new British audience, one that already knows about the dangers of American football, to learn to speak it.