President Barack Obama, a serious sports fan, said that because of the violent nature of football, he might not allow his son to play football, if he had one.
Obama said in The New Republic that football fans must wrestle with the fact that the game will probably change over time to try to reduce the violence.
The president says that some of those changes might make football, in his words, “a bit less exciting” but that it will be much better for players.
“And those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much,” he said.
The interview appears in the Feb. 11 issue of the magazine.
Obama says he worries more about college players than those in the NFL because the pros have a union, are well-paid and are grown men.
“They can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies,” Obama said. “You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.”
