Serious question about NFL holding calls..

[Crossless2.0]

Survive declining interest, Cap'n.  The decline has been going on for a decade.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/201...0dc4687540

By any measure in the National Federation of High School Associations' athletic participation survey -- the most comprehensive annual study of youth sports participation in the United States -- football is nearing a decade of decline. A few numbers from the 2017-18 NFHS survey, released in August (numbers are aggregated after they are reported by NFHS' state athletic association members that oversee high school sports):

• The number of 11-player football participants is down 6.5 percent from its peak in 2009-10 -- to 1,039,079 at 14,079 schools during the 2017-18 season from a top of 1,110,527 at 14,226 schools. The number of girls in 11-player football has nearly doubled during that time, but that's only to 2,237 players, not nearly enough to make up for 72,436 fewer boys.
  

I was astounded to read that schools in North Carolina were being forced to give up varsity football because not enough kids came out for the team.  I always thought that football was even more important than religion in the south.

Southern parents aren’t complete morons. Faced with the undeniable fact that football can lead to brain damage, they knew that something had to go: football or the Baptist faith.

After all, there’s a limit to how much damage one is willing to inflict on one’s boys to shape them in one’s image and to live vicariously through them. Two activities that might render them blithering idiots as adults were one too many.