Why My Son Will Play Football
Smart high schoolers will not play football in the future. Time to take advantage for college admissions.
Dear Parents of Intellectually Gifted Sons,
Thanks to CTE, your son can get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton or any of the “lesser Ivies” (only as back-ups). And you have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or “CTE”) to thank.
It’s only getting harder to get into these elite American institutions. For the class of 2029, the acceptance rates for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were the following: 4.2%, 4.5%, and 4.6% (respectively). Those numbers are intimidating — perhaps even life-threatening and existential — to the parents of the high schoolers applying to selective colleges in just a few months in fall of 2025, but it’s even worse for someone else. Imagine that you just had a baby. A child born between the summer of 2024 and the summer 2025 will be applying to college in the fall of 2042. What will happen between now and then? If trends continue, then competition to get into these schools will only increase. Safety schools become match schools, and match schools become reaches.
Now, let’s say that baby is a boy. Maybe you can insulate your son from the dread of college admissions in 2042. Instead of worrying about safety schools, maybe you should train him to be a safety. If your son Liam (the most common baby boy name in 2024) excels on his high school football team’s defense as a safety, then every elite private university can become a safety. Except for Stanford. There are no shortcuts at Stanford.
When you see secular trends — such as the ever-increasing selectivity of these institutions — working against you, you must find an edge. Some secular trends in college admissions likely are working in your favor, but people have either not discovered them or not exploited them yet. I posit that you as parents can capitalize on shifting populations in high school sports.
People have forever seen sports as a backdoor into the Ivy League. People have always joked about fencing — but, then, everyone knew about fencing. It’s like your 70-year-old aunt who still uses a Hotmail address bringing up Ethereum to you. What is the new fencing? People aware of the elite college admissions process have always known about these sports, but I think that this idea really penetrated the public consciousness after 2019’s Varsity Blues scandal, in which many Hollywood celebrities used their wealth and influence to essentially bribe schools into admitting their children.
The names of actresses Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman came up most frequently, but Laughlin has the most relevance to my essay here today. Laughlin paid $500 thousand to bribe USC coaches to get her two daughters onto the school’s rowing team even though neither ever participated in the sport in high school. In May 2020, Lori Laughlin pled guilty and served two months in federal prison and paid a fine of $150 thousand.
Could sports really help a child that much? Of course, I am not condoning bribing an athletic coach at a prestigious school, but Laughlin’s scandal still reminded us that the rich use sports as a backdoor. Yes, it is true, but knowledge of this fact does not help you at all. You must identify the sport that you can leverage the most. If you want to imbue your child with athletic talent, you must identify a sport early to maximize his chance of achieving greatness by high school for college recruitment.
Now, the answer for boys and girls differs because different sports have different saturations of high schoolers in the two sexes. No girls play football. Many more girls participate in volleyball and gymnastics than boys do, yet a male volleyball team needs just as many players. Furthermore, all eight Ivies have both a women’s volleyball team and a men’s volleyball team.
With my advice (and conjecture) here, I will only be discussing boys because I can identify the biggest edge with boys’ sports. I posit that girls can leverage ice hockey the most, but girls deserve their own article. Besides, no other sport has the cultural consequences and stigmas that football has, and only boys play college football. Beyond limiting my analysis to boys, I am also limiting my analysis to parents who have academically capable sons, and parents who can afford to send their sons to the very expensive Ivy League, which famously offers no athletic scholarships. The Ivy League is the only Division I conference that does not offer athletic scholarships.
Where does CTE play into all of this? CTE first inspired this “take” of mine, but — as I thought more — I further realized the supremacy of football as the sport for elite college admissions. First of all, I want to note that I am not making light of CTE. It is a terrible disease, but I am analyzing CTE from a cultural and political perspective.
If you are wealthy enough parents who want your son to get into an elite private college, then you probably are smart, or — at least — you should be. Your son should at least be smart so that he can excel in high school and earn high standardized test scores. If you cannot reach that bar, then this whole strategy crumbles.
The Ivy League popularized football as we know it in the U.S. today in the late 19th century and early 20th century. When Americans thought about college football or football in general, they thought about the Ivy League. The game used to serve as a signal for the Harvard gentleman. Alongside preparatory schools in the United States and the United Kingdom, the Ivy League schools touted muscular Christianity. This philosophy argued that a physically fit boy embodies the principles of Christ. Since most of these elite schools began as Christian institutions, the paragon of academic excellence began including that of muscular Christianity. Eventually, the Christianity part vanished once these schools strayed away from religion.
An educated boy needed to be physically fit. He needed to excel at athletics and academics. The body is just an extension of the mind. College football — especially, at the Ivy League — became a distinctly American way to signal both erudite education and physical capability. The body strengthened the brain, and the brain strengthened the body … until we realized that a contact sport like football can damage the brain through conditions like CTE.
CTE rightfully began scaring parents of young boys. Why would you allow your sons to play in a sport that threatened their brain? For smart parents, the brain is what fuels a meaningful life. The vast majority of these parents don’t use their body or braun for their lucrative work. They’re not coal miners. They’re not dockworkers. They’re not lumberjacks. They’re neurosurgeons. They’re corporate attorneys at DL Piper. They’re partners at McKinsey. They use their brain in the knowledge economy. If CTE kills your brain, then your son Brett can never excel at Goldman Sachs. He can’t make it to Yale Law School. He can’t make it to Harvard Medical School. He can’t be a quant for Jane Street. He can’t be a software engineer for Apple. Your brain provides you with your merit and value to society.
Luckily, for you, these parents disproportionately produce the highest number of children who pose competition in elite college admissions to your children. Perhaps you have a high-paying job in the knowledge economy. You are more likely to produce one of these Gifted Children™, the lucky few who get called up to the Ivy League. All of these competing children will be applying academically to the top schools, and you don’t want to be in that pool with them. That’s a dangerous pool … a pool teeming with piranhas. You want a pool in which you can separate your gifted sons.
As we have already established, you do have the athletic lane open to you, but we again encounter an issue. We have asked this question earlier. Which sport can you leverage the most? Very wealthy and smart parents will pour their resources into training their sons into sports with limited physical threat: tennis, pole vault, swimming, etc. Over the next few years, at least by 2042, I contend that these sports with less physical contact will increase in numbers with sons of parents scared about CTE.
I don’t necessarily think that football will decrease in numbers. Perhaps it will, but it will definitely decrease in numbers with the demographic of intellectually gifted boys whose parents want to protect their precious brains from CTE, and I get it! The brain is precious! You should keep it safe! However, as a result, the GPAs and standardized test scores for the average high school football player in the U.S. will decrease. The smart parents are taking their smart sons out of the football pool.
These changes do not affect the universities in the Power Four. They do not necessarily care about academic ability. Even academically elite institutions in the Power Four — such as Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, and Northwestern — look the other way, but the Ivy League still cares about academic standards in its athletic recruits. Sure, the academic metrics for Ivy League football players are lower than those of the Ivy League students who got accepted purely on academics, but I would assume that the average SAT score in Ivy League football teams is significantly higher than that of the Stanford football team.
Regardless, the Ivy League football recruiters will be getting fewer and fewer academically elite prospects. If you have an academically elite son who plays football, he will more and more stand out in the pool of high schoolers who also play football. Your son does not have the same edge in the “country club” sports of swimming, squash, golf, etc.
Of course, I am not making light of CTE as a medical condition. I understand its seriousness. It ruins lives, but we must analyze whose lives it ruins. CTE comes to players with long careers in the NFL and the top level of Power Four football in college. CTE has a much lower chance of occurring with a boy with a relatively brief career in high school football, which poses much less danger. Most high schoolers playing high school football with your son are not physical monsters as they are in the NFL. Getting tackled in the NFL or Power Four football is much more severe than in high school football.
Furthermore, not every position comes with the same risk of CTE. Kickers, punters, and quarterbacks have little risk. The positions of lineman and running back have the worst risk, so you can adjust your son’s position based on your risk tolerance. We need to be clear about the goal here. You are not trying to get your son to play in the NFL or in a Power Four program. You want your son to play in the Ivy League. More accurately, you are using football as a way to get your son into the Ivy League.
I am not saying that CTE does not threaten NFL players and high-level college football players. It obviously does, but it does not threaten high school boys in the same way that it does at the upper level. The risk of CTE also comes with a prolonged career of many, many years. High school is only four years. The Ivy League hasn’t even allowed tackling in its practices since the 2015 season.
You are making a risk-reward analysis. Your son is taking orders of magnitude more risk by driving to football practice than he is by playing the actual sport, but we give him a car anyway. We allow him to drive alone at 16 years old. If driving is so dangerous — especially, for teenage boys — then why do you allow your son to drive? It’s because the benefits of giving your son driving autonomy outweigh the risks, or — at least — you have made that conclusion. And the conclusion that you make is all that matters.
Can we not do the same for football? The risk of CTE in high school is very low, but what does he gain from football? He will be physically fit. He will have more social capital in high school, and maybe he can get into the Ivy League too.
Sure, you might see CTE as life-threatening and existential, but what about not getting into a prestigious school? For the anxious parents of the elite children of the United States, isn’t going to a safety school just as life-threatening? Isn’t it just as existential? Not going to the Ivy League might hurt your chances at success at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey just as much as CTE would.