Should college football be banned?

Football is one of the most popular sports in the United States; it’s played everywhere and by people of all ages. College football is a level below the biggest stage in football, the NFL. Although college football is widely accepted by fans and players, some people feel that football has an overall negative effect on players’ physical and academic progress.

Even though college football can help college students succeed in sports and have the opportunity to attend college because of scholarships, it does cause students to consider football over academics. Football exploits  players for their school's selfish purposes, but one of the main reasons for banning college football is the amount of head injury players receive during their football playing career and the negative impact there is on their future. Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian author and journalist, spoke in a nytimes.com article about the pictures he’s seen of people’s brains and how it looked like they were run over by a truck. “I’ve seen pictures of the brain scans of people with C.T.E.,” he said, referring to the trauma-induced disease, “and it looks like someone drove a truck across their brain.” Gladwell is concerned about how football negatively affects a player’s brain in the long run to a point where the brain can no longer function properly because of the amount of hits they take. 

College football should be banned because players that don’t make it to the NFL end up finishing college with mediocre grades and have to give up their football dream. In the long run the former football players will develop conditions like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) because of the hard hits received to the head. Overall playing football for four years in college isn’t worth the amount of pain you’ll receive in the future when the players start noticing the affects of their concussions.