Forty-four percent of parents were not comfortable with the idea of their children playing football, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll released last week.
Only five percent of parents have actually discouraged their children from playing football in the last two years, however.
In some ways, this finding shouldn’t come across as novel. Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth-football program, experienced a 9.5-percent drop in participation between 2010-12. High school football participation rose for just the first time in five years this past school year.
Last year, TheMMQB.com (an offshoot of