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What's good? You're listening to Code Switch.

I'm Gene Dempie.

So over the last few Mondays, we've been talking about football, which is America's most popular sport, and it's not even really close, yo.

And it's a sport with an almost unavoidable physical toll.

I mean, we're only just now starting to be real about the extent the cost that comes

from playing this sport. And those costs don't just pile up for the folks who went pro, right?

Like Dominic Foxworth, who was our guest last week, there's been so much more reporting and

research about the dangers of concussions and brain disease among young people who play the sport

in peewees in high school.

Knowing that is not necessarily dampening Americans' love for watching football,

but it does seem to be changing who is picking up the ball and putting on the pads and deciding to play.

The Washington Post did a big feature not too long ago that found that the numbers of kids is actually in decline and that fewer black and white kids are playing it.

The number of Latino kids, though, is actually on the rise.

They also found something of a red state, blue state divide on this, with conservatives more likely to say that they would allow their kids to play football, while liberals were more likely to say that they would

discourage their kids from doing so.

And so we don't know what these demographic trend lines were saying on the youth level will mean

for the makeup of the sport at the highest level.

That's the NFL, of course.

But we know the NFL is mostly black now and has been for a long time.

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