President Obama is featured on 60 Minutes and he also spoke in an interview about his son playing football. Could it become illegal in the future?
President Obama is arguably the most powerful sports fan in the world--just don't ask him if he would let his son play football.
The commander in chief holds the highest office in America and Mr. Obama is known as an avid sports fan and athletic competitor, having played basketball and other sports while keeping busy during his four years in office.
As a Chicago native, he is a fan of the White Sox and the Bears, but in an interview with The New Republic, President Obama said that he would have to ponder long and hard whether to allow his son to play the game. He also said that the game people know now will likely change over time to reduce the violence.
"And those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much," he said, according to ESPN.com. The interview appears in the Feb. 11 issue of The New Republic.
Obama mentioned the NFL, but he expressed more concern about the college level since the professionals are compensated for their work.
"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 of NFL players. "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."
The President's quotes come at an interesting crossroads for the NFL, as the high-profile death of linebacker Junior Seau and the issues related to head injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are at the forefront of conversations about the game of football.
But the President making his opinion known about football isn't a new trend by a long shot. Back in the early 1900s when football was mostly a college game, President Theodore Roosevelt helped create the NCAA itself and made the sport less violent.
In the winter of 1905, Roosevelt met with representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and held conference that "encouraged reforms" to make the game less violent, including the reduction of the flying wedge and the legalization of the forward pass. Soon after, the chancellor of New York University helped organize a meeting of 13 colleges and universities to initiate those changes.
Later on, those schools and others joined to become the charter members of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, which later changed its name to the National College Athletic Association in 1910. The sport eventually mandated helmets and became much safer after an early era that saw serious injuries and even some deaths.
The NFL has taken a range of measures to help make the game safer amongst many lawsuits from former NFL players, including the family of Seau, who is suing the league for wrongful death. The league has changed the rules on helmet contact as well as hits on defenseless players, adding fines and suspensions for players.
The NFL also changed the rules on kickoffs last season, moving kicks from the 30-yard line to the 35 and required the coverage unit to start within five yards of the ball, which decreased the distance between the teams.
Earlier this year, Goodell spoke to TIME Magazine in an interview about the possibility of further rule changes and how it has worked so far. The report detailed a meeting between Goodell and Rich McKay, the head of the league's competition committee, in which the two discussed an idea that was proposed by Tampa Bay head coach Greg Schiano earlier this year that would eliminate kickoffs and returns.
According to the magazine, "TIME sat in on meeting between Goodell and Rich McKay, head of the NFL's powerful competition committee. Goodell brought up a proposal promoted by Greg Schiano, coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: after a touchdown or field goal, instead of kicking off, a team would get the ball on its own 30-yard line, where it's fourth-and-15. The options are either to go for it and try to retain possession, or punt. If you go for it and fall short, the opposing team would take over with good field position. In essence, punts would replace kickoffs, and punts are less susceptible to violent collisions than kickoffs."
The change is still a long way from coming, but it's the way the league has been leaning over the past few years.
President Obama has never hidden his love for sports and has been featured on ESPN over the past few years during March Madness to pick his bracket. He has thrown the first ball out at a White Sox game and he also will appear in an interview with CBS before the broadcast of this years Super Bowl.