August 8, 2025   If you drove by a Colorado high school this week, you might have spot the opening of fall football practices for most programs.   They'll be working up to it, with full equipment and contact being introduced to the mix before "Zero Week" games on Aug. 21.   Perhaps as recently as five years ago, I was convinced that youth and high school football would be endangered by now. I wasn't forecasting a precipitous drop in the the box office and broadcast  "popularity" in the college and pro games, but rather the threats posed by liability and insurance issues at the feeder levels, including at high schools; plus more and more parents and even young athletes deciding there were better options for them than football.    In 2016, the NFL's $1-billion settlement of concussion claims with retired players seemed only the latest of the hits to the game's participatory future.   When the Bills' Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest in a 2023 game against the Bengals and from all indications beat the odds to survive, that tightened and brightened the spotlight on football's dangers. This is the whispered secret, too: It's actually surprising that life-threatening or otherwise horrific trauma isn't more common at all  levels of football.         We knew football wasn't going away, but the warning signs about the risks -- at all levels  -- have been piling up. I've written about the issue many times over the years, especially noting the toll of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and in many cases the posthumous confirmation of its presence in former players after their brains were donated for study.   That included several figures in my books, most notably former University of Texas defensive tackle Greg Ploetz. (Much of my archived writing about Greg is accessible HERE.) I interviewed him at length for Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming in 2001, before he showed signs of deterioration. He eventually suffered from dementia for several years before his 2015 death. In 2014, his wife, Deb, brought him to the Denver area to undergo treatment with marijuana products, which couldn't be used legally in Texas at the time. After Greg's death, Deb sued the NCAA in Dallas District Court in 2018. She reached a settlement just before the potentially landmark Ploetz vs. NCAA case was about to go to trial. Examination of his brain after his death showed that he had suffered from Stage 4 CTE -- as bad as it gets.   The NCAA subpoenaed and deposed me in that case, through the Denver District Court, seeking tapes, notes and other material from my interviews of Ploetz for my book. The underplayed aspect of the case was it was an individual suit that somehow squeezed through the system and could have been a monumental precedent if it hadn't been settled. The many other court cases pending against the NCAA are class-action suits involving multiple plaintiffs. I still vividly recall Deb Ploetz telling me that when she sees youth football practices, she wante to pull over and plead with parents to keep their kids out of football.    Flashback: At a joint reunion of the 1969 Texas Longhorns and Arkansas Razorbacks in 2004, I was the neutral keynote speaker. At left,  I'm signing a copy of Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming for Deb Ploetz. At right, Greg Ploetz at the reunion.     In an eerie quirk of timing, Deb Ploetz passed through the Denver area this past week, and on Friday I met with her and her traveling companion, Rick Troberman, a former Texas linebacker and a one-time Greg Ploetz Longhorns football program roommate. The three of us had lunch at Esters in Wheat Ridge and Deb and I caught up. I wanted to make it a social lunch, not a business meeting, and we succeeded at that.      At left, I'm with Deb Ploetz at Ester's in Whear Ridge. At right, at the same lunch, Deb is with her friend, former Longhorns linebacker Rick Troberman.     *   *   *    I also did several stories on former Broncos running back Rob Lytle, who died in 2010.   Plus, I wrote an award-winning newspaper story on the physical problems many members of the 1977 Broncos ('77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age) were having in post-retirement life, plus other followup pieces on that team. In the media, we've also followed the stories of CTE's confirmed presence and effects, most of them tragic to varying degrees. I'd be willing to bet that if it becomes possible to conclusively determine if a retired, but still-living, NFL player has CTE, a majority would.               The point is, I've seen and written about the tolls of the game from many angles, across many years. I've even got the scars that are evidence of two ACL surgeries and, now, a knee replacement. The only quibble I have with the recent coverage of Hamlin's amazing survival -- with the help of those who quickly came to his aid -- is that many seemed to overlook or underplay scary and terrible incidents in the past, including instances of paralysis (among them, Darryl Stingley and Mike Utley). While the risks might be most striking at the NFL level because of the cumulative tolls from mouth-dropping impacts among the best in the sport, it's far from danger-free at, say, the junior-high or high school levels. I'm not going to do hours of research and crunch numbers and provide a flood of anecdotal examples. That's not necessary to make the point: It's a perilous sport. Period.            That's a rambling preamble, but it helps explain why I thought football would be an endangered species by now, first and perhaps foremost because of those liability issues at youth and high school levels. Other sports -- whether hockey, soccer, basketball and even baseball -- have their injury perils, including concussions. But football is at the top of the list, involving immediate tolls and inevitable eventual physical deterioration. If you are able to take roll at Bronco Alumni weekends and assess the physical damages, you wince. You feel their pains. You really do.    Then you come to the key questions, those more tied to football than any others:   In 2025 -- or beyond -- would you want your kid play football?   In 2025 -- or beyond -- and you were a kid, would you want to play football?      This part is both good and bad: Increased athletic specialization among the young cuts into the football numbers. This might seem contradictory, but count me among those who applaud the benefits of playing multiple sports, whether football is one of them or not. I also think it's a step forward if young athletes cease feeling some sort of obligation to play football because that's what good athletes are supposed to do. That can stem from peer or parental pressures -- or both.   The landscape continues to change. Another of my concerns is that the mania tied to NIL, the transfer portal and "x"-star prospects picking out one of the hats in front of them to indicate their college choice as a path to the riches of the NFL will add to the unrealistic expectations that long have been common. That could lead to young men ignoring the perils of the game and assuming more than ever before that they're invulnerable.     Yes, play football. But because you want to, not because of the perception that your buddies or your parents want you to. Not because you're on the fast-track to the college game or the NFL. (You likely aren't. And don't let anyone lay that crap on you that if you want it bad enough, you can achieve it. Life isn't fair.) Parents should grill their sons on those points. Plus, of course, feel confident that coaches and others involved  know what the hell they're doing. And if you don't like it, you're NOT a "quitter" if you give it up.     It's not for everyone.