Chuck Klosterman's ninth book, But What If We're Wrong?, considers the possibility that contemporary people might be incorrect about some of our most deeply held, fundamentally unquestioned opinions and beliefs. Subtitled Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, the book explores how (and why) societies in 100 or 300 or 1,000 years might hold radically altered memories of the literature, entertainment, science, and politics of the early 21st century, contradicting the way those concepts are casually considered in the present. This excerpt is the first of a two-part chapter on the tenuous future of American football.

Prop Stylist: Robin Finlay. Makeup: Tara Cooper

On a frigid evening in February 2010, I was asked to appear at a reading series held in a Brooklyn art gallery. I accepted the invitation. I did not, however, pay much attention to the details of the invite and erroneously assumed this art gallery was located in Manhattan, which meant I was 25 minutes late for the opening of an event where I was the opening act. The evening's headliner was writer Malcolm Gladwell, whom I'd met in person maybe five or six times before (and on two of those occasions, we'd discussed the Buffalo Bills†). Since I was still crossing the East River in a taxi at the 7 P.M. start time, the order of the speakers was flopped. Gladwell graciously spoke first. When I finally arrived, he was almost finished with his piece, a reported essay from The New Yorker about why NFL teams are habitually terrible at drafting quarterbacks. Upon finishing the reading, he took a handful of questions from the audience, almost all of which were about football. The last question was about the future of the sport. Gladwell's response, at least at the time, seemed preposterous. “In 25 years,” he said, “no one in America will play football and no one in America will eat red meat.” He thanked the crowd and exited the stage.

After a brief intermission, it was my turn to perform. Sensing a mild degree of bewilderment from the audience, I tried to break the ice by making a joke about Gladwell's closing prediction. “There is no way people will not be playing football or eating meat in 25 years,” I said. “In fact, there is a much higher likelihood that in 25 years, I will literally eat the flesh of all the various football players who've died during whatever game I happened to watch that day.” Forty people laughed. I then favorably compared the state of Alabama to the island of Samoa. Four people laughed. But here's the pivotal takeaway from that particular night: At the time, my absurdist jokes felt more reasonable than Gladwell's analysis. Predicting that the most popular game in the country would no longer exist in less than two generations made it seem like he didn't really know what he was talking about. But now, of course, everyone talks like Gladwell. In the span of five years, that sentiment has become the conventional intellectual take on the future of football. It is no longer a strange thing to anticipate. Gladwell has grown even more confident: “This is a sport that is living in the past, that has no connection to the realities of the game right now and no connection to the rest of society,” I heard him say on a TV show called Studio 1.0. “[The NFL] is completely disconnected to the consequences of the sport that they are engaged in.… They are off on this 19th-century trajectory which is fundamentally out of touch with the rest of us.” The show's host asked if he still believed football was destined to die. “I don't see how it doesn't. It will start to shrivel at the high school and college level, and then the pro game will wither on the vine.”

It's disorienting how rapidly this perception has normalized, particularly considering a central contradiction no one seems to deny—football is not only the most popular sport in the country but a sport that is becoming more popular, assuming TV ratings can be trusted as a yardstick. It's among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture; it could be convincingly argued that football is more popular in America than every other sport combined. Over 110 million people watched the most recent Super Bowl, but that stat is a predictable outlier—what's more stunning is the 25 million people who regularly watch the NFL draft. Every spring, millions of people spend three days scrutinizing a middle-aged man in a gray suit walking up to a podium to announce the names of people who have not yet signed a contract. Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we'd seriously consider giving it up. Which is the kind of conversation that pushes everyone else toward one of two conclusions:

1. Football is doomed. This is the Gladwellian outlook, and it generally goes something like this: The number of on-field concussions continues to increase, as does the medical evidence of how dangerous football truly is. More and more pro players proactively quit (San Francisco linebacker Chris Borland being the first high-profile example). Retired players start to show signs of mental deficiency at a higher and higher frequency. Perhaps a prominent wide receiver is killed on national television, and his death dominates the national conversation for three months. The issue becomes political, and the president gets involved (much like Teddy Roosevelt did in 1905, the year 19 college players were killed on football fields). Virtually all parents stop their children from playing youth football, and schools can't afford the insurance liability required for a collision sport of this magnitude. The high school game rapidly disappears, leading to a collapse of the college game. With its feeder system eliminated, the NFL morphs into a sloppy enterprise that's still highly dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Public interest evaporates and a $50 billion bubble spontaneously bursts. Like 32 brachiosaurs, NFL teams are too massive to evolve. In less than a generation, the game vanishes. Its market share is split between soccer and basketball.

Prop Stylist: Robin Finlay. Makeup: Tara Cooper

2. Football will survive, but not in its current form. The less incendiary take on football's future suggests that it will continue, but in a different shape. It becomes a regional sport, primarily confined to places where football is ingrained in the day-to-day culture (Florida, Texas, etc.). Its fan base resembles that of contemporary boxing—rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves. The NFL persists through sheer social pervasiveness—a system that's too big to fail and too economically essential to too many micro-economies. The game itself is altered for safety. “As a natural optimist who loves football, I can only really give one answer to this question, and the answer is yes. I believe that football can and will still have a significant place in American culture in a hundred years,” says Michael MacCambridge, author of the comprehensive NFL history America's Game. “That said, I suspect it will be a less violent game than it has been in the past. And this would be in line with the changes throughout American spectator sports—and society at large—over the previous century. In the 19th century, in baseball, you could throw a runner out on his way to first merely by pegging him in the back with the ball while he was hurrying down the first-base line. That age of bare-knuckles boxing and cockfighting and football as organized mayhem eventually changed to reflect the sensibilities of the modern era. So football will continue to change over the next century, and so will protective football equipment.”