Floods

Like many disasters, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 happened because of big mistakes made much, much earlier — in this case, almost a half-century earlier. At question, as the Industrial Revolution kicked a national economy into gear, was how to tame the vast Mississippi river, whose fertile delta was one of the most productive swaths of farmland in the world and whose length, width and depth made New Orleans of the great trading posts of the world.

Competing to provide the answer were two bitterly opposed titans of American engineering. James Buchanan Eads had so mastered the currents and swells of the Mississippi that riverboat pilots called him “Captain Eads,” and the bridge he built in St. Louis in 1874 stands to this day; Eads called for a network of channels which would bleed away rising river tides. His rival, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, was the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers; his proposal emphasized building high levees which would contain the river and prevent floods. Neither advocated a levee-only policy, but their acrimony was so great that the commission in charge of the project wound up recommending just such an approach — even though Eads and Buchanan subsequently opposed it.

Then, in 1927, disaster struck. Heavy rains throughout the Midwest in the fall of 1926 were followed by record snow storms. More rain and melting snow came in April, overcoming the levies first just north of Greenville, Mississippi and then southward, toward New Orleans. To protect the city, the New Orleans grandees who dominated Louisiana ordered the levees blown, saving New Orleans but releasing enough water — rushing out at three million cubic feet a second, three times the 1993 flood’s pace — to wipe out an area the size of New England. Nearly a million people were forced out of their homes, and the Red Cross provided food and shelter to almost 700,000 people for months. Herbert Hoover led the relief effort, giving him a national exposure that propelled him into the White House a year later.

But the flood wiped out more than that. Southern oligarchs, particularly the Percy family of Mississippi, had been fighting a winning war against the Ku Klux Klan, and in trying to recruit African-Americans to farm the rich Delta fields, established universal schooling for their children and racially tolerant communities. There seemed a vague but legitimate social contract which — if not perfect justice — kept the peace and offered chances for self-improvement. All of that collapsed when New Orleans gave the order to blow the levies upstream, saving the French Quarter but dooming millions. In a stroke, the oligarchy lost its legitimacy. In came Huey Long, promising to humble the grandees; in came a resurgent KKK, in came a Southern Populist political movement that owed less to a philosophically coherent set of views than an inherent distrust of political, economic, and cultural elites. On April 10, 1927 the South faced one kind of future, and in the days following the flood, that future changed; it’s hard to say for the better or for the worse, but its new course was profoundly different and profoundly more chaotic and unpredictable. And all because in the 1870s, planners decided that the best way to control a mighty force like a great river was to contain, to build the levees high. (For an absolutely superb recounting of the Flood and its causes and consequences, see John Barry’s Rising Tide.)

Which, seamlessly, leads us to Occupy Wall Street and the financial community. The trends driving the broad-based dissatisfaction that OWS represents have been in the works for years — a widening income gap, volatile job market, a churning, accelerating economic complexity that makes it difficult to connect merit and reward, and a broadening exposure to the whims of the financial markets. If you made a lot of money (like big Wall Street financial firms) in an incredibly abstract industry (like the financial services industry) whose excesses and miscalculations led to a global financial meltdown (like the big Wall Street investment banks) and were then absorbed by federal taxpayers (like… ok, you get the picture), you might have thought about what might happen when all these forces converged. And you might have taken steps to channel those pressures, much as Eads proposed channeling Mississippi floodwaters.

But that’s not how the financial community has worked. For decades, it has sought to contain social and economic volatility within a political levee system. Few industries spend as much on lobbying, few foster such close relationships with their regulators, and few have business models which are so closely entwined with the nuances of the industry’s highly complex, often contradictory regulatory and legal structure. I can’t think of a single industry where so many top executives have at least a significant stint in government. My point here isn’t that any of these are bad, and I think the whole concept of influence-buying is drastically overdone. My point is that Wall Street tends to view Washington and its political institutions as bulwarks against broader volatility which it can generally rely on to prevent major changes to their business models; based on this, the financial community is then free to pursue its own interests without regard to the consequences.

What kind of channels could have relieved some of this pressure? Any industry as abstract and lucrative as financial services is going to have a hard time getting public sympathy, but a sense of trustworthiness is a realistic goal. That means restraint and resolve: not pushing risky and complex products to consumers who don’t understand them, taking systemic risk seriously, and being willing to call out bad behavior. What would have happened in 2006 if a highly regarded leader in the banking world had said, publicly, that Lehman’s or Bear Stearns’ derivatives didn’t pass the smell test and were off limits to his bank’s traders? What would have happened in 1996 — when Glass-Steagal repeal was on the table — if a big bank or investment firm CEO said that a diversified financial services company should only be able to trade for itself using executives’ own money, like a partnership? What would happen right now, if someone with money on the table publicly acknowledged that the current vogue in high volume, high-speed (as in ridiculously high-speed) algorhythm-based trading is, well, just plain crazy? (And when trading platforms are built in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, simply to shorten trading times by milliseconds, just plain crazy is exactly how to describe it).  Would money have been left on the table?  Sure.  On the other hand, the movement of people of nearly every conceivable philosophical, educational, and income level who want Wall Street taken down a peg (or several) — the more painfully the better — might never have gotten off the ground.

But the decision — de facto, if not specific — was to protect itself behind a political system defined, most of the time, by inertia — that’s how it has managed its significant political risk.  OWS is a result of that core decision. We don’t know what it will actually lead to, but its momentum is only increasing and its breadth expanding. We should know that OWS is making politics more volatile, and that the forces of unrest that are driving it could have significant policy consequences. Could it lead to big tax increases for the wealthy, big restrictions in how Wall Street operates, big changes in how corporations make decisions? We don’t know. But the odds are greater than they were before Zuccotti Park became a staging ground for protest a month ago.

A Good Week for the Short Term

Presidencies have a way of defining themselves in singular, dramatic, unexpected moments.  For Reagan, it was at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the last great rhetorical charge by the winner of the Cold War, challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Iron Curtain even as (to the West, unseen) economic and political forces were tearing away at the fabric of the entire Soviet Union.  For the first President Bush, it was a declaration that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait “will not stand”; for the second, it was being given a megaphone at Ground Zero and summoning the nation’s sympathy, anger, and determination.  Bill Clinton’s, unavoidably, will be these words:  “I did not have sex with that woman.”  These moments might be prepared for but they’re not scripted, and that spontaneity — that collision of event and self — makes them so powerful.

For Barack Obama, that moment will be the picture in the White House situation room, watching the mission to take down Osama bin Laden.  It was a risky mission on multiple levels, and consequences of failure would have been severe.  Only he could sign off on it, and despite the potential pitfalls, he did, reasoning that the opportunity outweighed the risk.  He owns the success, just as he would have owned the failure, and for that boldness and decisiveness he has to be given due credit.

So there he is, at the side of a small conference table, eyes glued to the monitor in front of him, almost impervious to anyone around him.  He’s not demonstrative, like Hillary Clinton, or formal, like William Daley.  He’s simply watching events unfurl, roughly and concretely.  We don’t know exactly what he saw (Clinton’s gasp indicates it was something dramatic), and whether in fact he saw bin Laden’s last living moments.  As much as anything, he is watching a decision — several decisions, actually, given how deeply involved he was in the planning — play out in real time, something Presidents and policy makers rarely get to do, and with his own and the nation’s prestige on the line.

That this seems such a fitting portrait of his leadership isn’t necessarily a good thing.  Obama, it tells us, likes to decide.  He likes specific, clearly delineated problems with timelines, options and checklists; he likes hearing a variety of opinions, likes challenging them, and trusts his ability to line up the data toward a well-reasoned and calculated plan of action.  He likes the short term.

Contrast that with House Speaker John Boehner.  Boehner’s strength is the long term — the ability to think through variables and uncertainties, set a goal, and march through a strategy for achieving it.  This is a strength suited for legislation, which is all about variables and uncertainties and has none of the tidiness of checklists and maps.  This isn’t just a defining element of Boehner’s style or personality.  It’s why he has almost routinely beaten Obama wherever the two have faced off.

On Monday Boehner gave a speech on the messiest and most important long term challenge the country faces — our looming fiscal crisis.  It’s pretty clear from the speech that Boehner has a plan.  He’ll continue to link (correctly) our short-term jobs problem to the longer-term fiscal threat, he’ll use the pressure of a necessary debt limit bill to force concrete spending cuts, and he’ll leave as an alternative to a big spending cut package the possibility of multiple incremental debt limit increases, knowing that each one puts Obama and Democrats in a tougher and tougher political bind going into an election year.

It’s just as clear from the White House that Obama doesn’t have a plan.  He  has a proposal, but there’s no sense of strategy surrounding it just as there’s no sense that he really embraces it.  It’s just a proposal, a package of ideas sifted through experts and advisors, just like the mission to take out bin Laden.  Except that legislation is not a military mission.  It’s much, much harder.

Obama had a great week, but it was one that played to his strength in short-term decision making.  That’s not ultimately what Presidencies are judged by, and suggests that more of the good weeks to come will be Boehner’s, not his.

Bin Laden, Apollo 13, and Complexity

What’s coming to light in the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s successful — ummm… — termination with extreme prejudice is the enormous credit earned by good old fashioned public servants in the military and the intelligence communities.  As Bin Laden went silent, the political class did what the political class does when things aren’t going well — minimize exposure by lowering expectations, move resources to where short-term success is more important and likely.  But the soldiers and operatives in Afghanistan and the analysts in Langley never quit.  They found the patience, creativity and dedication to trace the steps to Abbottabad, and finally convinced their bosses in Washington that here was the place, now was the time.

In fact, this kind of challenge brings out the best of public workers.  Think of the Apollo missions, particularly Apollo 13, which lost an entire side panel and a tank of oxygen to a mid-space explosion.  On the fly, NASA was able to completely reroute and reengineer the mission and its craft to return its three astronauts to earth unharmed; the real story is so powerfully dramatic that the movie based on it didn’t embellish anything.  Think of how quickly and effectively New York’s police and firefighters got the city up and running after 9/11; think too of how since 9/11 not a single terrorist strike has happened on U.S. soil.  Or disease:  polio terrified whole generations but now, for all practical purposes, it’s gone.  When there are clean lines of authority, a dominant, simple focus, and clear urgency, government can be astoundingly effective, no matter how great the challenge.

Now let’s contrast that to the economy — where governmental involvement has no clean lines of authority, where there are many, many points of focus, and where urgency motivates not just the need to succeed but the need not to be seen as failing.  In these kinds of circumstances, the government’s chances for success are almost a crapshoot.  Will last year’s financial reform package prevent another fiscal meltdown in the future?  Nobody seems to believe so.  Has the bet-the-house fiscal stimulus of 2008-2010 done what it was supposed to do?  Not on its own terms:  in 2009, the Administrations’ top two economic advisors projected that by now, unemployment would be at 6.5% (it’s at 9.0%).  Will last year’s health care reform actually improve the health levels of Americans at a reasonable cost?  Again, only those who directly link insurance coverage to health would argue that it will, and to do it they have to ignore nutrition, medical innovation, quality of medical care, and other big, big factors.  Or put it another way:  if government were to get as involved in providing music to Americans as it is in providing health care, would it do it even a quarter or a tenth as well as Apple?  Is this even a question?

The point: if Congress and the White House give solid leadership, direction, and focus to government employees, and where the challenge is on its own terms simple, no task is too daunting.  But government isn’t good at complexity, no matter how many resources are available or how much power is granted.  That might be a lesson for lawmakers and policy makers going forward.  Government isn’t nearly as ineffectual as lots of Republicans like to say it is but it’s nowhere near as effective as most Democrats like to assume it is.  Answering that basic question — how much complexity does the challenge present – might be the best way of figuring out how much we should expect from governmental involvement in any public policy question.

Patriot Way

How would your professional decisions — the ones you make for your organization — be different if you were free to make the best decisions, free of internal politics, competing agendas, or external expectations?  If all you had to worry about was the result, not the politics?

Answering that question is why I love watching the NFL draft, particularly the decisions made by New England’s vaunted head coach/ major domo, Bill Belichick.  Every year, the draft is like three dozen case studies in decisionmaking.  Some teams are driven by desperation.  This year, teams were desperate for quarterbacks, so four teams used their first-round picks on a QB class that impressed no one.  Other teams are driven by hope — that they’re just one or two players away from the Super Bowl, so they trade away lots of down-the-road picks so they can get the superstars who’ll put them over the hump.  Others still are driven by short-term business reasons; the Redskins for years routinely traded away vast quantities of picks so they could snatch up high-profile college stars who would prop up fan interest long enough to sell season tickets packages.  And some still are driven by love:  the NFL lifer, hoping to find the next Montana, Rice, or Ray Lewis, convincing himself that a player he likes is the genuine article.

Not Belichick.  Belichick is incredibly unusual in the coaching world in that he has the complete support of his owner and just one charge:  to contend for a Super Bowl championship every year.  He’s also unusual in his pedigree; both a coach’s son who has coached professionally since 1975 and who majored in economics at a very academically rigorous school.

The job security and the exposure to both football and economics allows him to see the game at its most fundamental level.  Today’s NFL isn’t solely about talent or superstars; it’s about excellence at specific positions (mostly quarterback), attrition, culture, and creating and exploiting market inefficiencies.  Belichick has the quarterback — Tom Brady, possibly the team’s only superstar.  His team model puts a higher priority on skills that don’t necessarily attract a lot of attention or budget-busting contracts — consistency, hard work, leadership, the ability to learn and execute different kinds of game plans and to constantly hone individual skills.

The others he addresses through the draft.  The college game is so different from the pro game that it’s hard to project a player’s NFL success accurately, so Belichick routinely trades single high picks for multiple later-round picks, and does this so well that six of the first 96 picks in this year’s draft are his (in a 32-team league).  He’ll also trade into future years, getting higher-round selections one or two years in the future.  To keep emotion in check, the Patriots methodically assess players for value, determining how much that player will help them in relation to the tradeable value of the pick in question and how much of their fixed budget they’ll have to spend on him.  This leaves him with lots of players whom he can assess further in training camp, and with depth at each position that can survive the rigors of an NFL season.

Belichick is very smart, very analytical, and very creative.  But other NFL coaches and general managers are too.  What sets apart Belichick and others whose teams are routinely successful in the NFL is how he can tune out distractions, focus on the best interests of his team, and make good decisions.  His job is solid; his reputation in New England is bullet-proof.  Other teams can’t, and every year, he turns their desperation, their loss of objectivity, their short-term striving, into more draft picks for the Patriots, a better choice of players, and more wins.

Beware the Middle

It’s been fashionable for a long time in some circles to decry gerrymandering and claim that federal policy would be so much better if congressional districts reflected a closer balance between Republicans and Democrats.  The long slog that’s led to the potential federal government shutdown on Monday is evidence that this might not be true:  that dramatically empowering independent voters might actually make for worse federal legislation.

Let’s start with 2008, when independent voters turned out in droves (by a two-to-one margin) to vote for Barack Obama and, while they were at it, Congressional Democrats.  Obama won 64 congressional districts that George W. Bush had carried in 2008 (McCain won exactly one district which had voted for John Kerry in 2008), House Democrats picked up 21seats, and Senate Democrats gained eight, mostly because Republicans lost the independent vote that had propelled them to majority in 1994 and maintained the White House in 2004 despite a weak economy.  Independents ruled.

Any party assuming control of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue faces enormous pressures from its base, but from the start Democrats found it extraordinarily difficult to navigate their way between the demands of their key constituencies and the interests of independents — so far as they knew them, because independents are, by nature, not led and not organized.  Health care legislation passed because vital Democratic organizations put everything they had into it, because Obama leveraged nearly everything he had to get it, and because Nancy Pelosi forced it own her members’ throats.  But other key constituency demands — a carbon emissions cap, card check legislation to help unions organize, withdrawal from Iraq and shutdown of Guantanamo Bay — all stalled because of concerns about how independents would react.  Much more important, the actual business of governing stopped as soon as it ran into anything that gave independents reason to think twice.  The appropriations process completely collapsed; in 2009 Congress passed essentially a one-year extension of the previous year’s spending, and in 2010 it couldn’t pass any spending bills at all.  And that was with 256 Democrats in the House and 58 in the Senate — significant majorities.  Democrats were simply unable to find a way to keep their base happy without antagonizing independents.

In 2010, of course, those independents — many of whom were swept up into the tea party movement — switched sides and gave Republicans huge wins; 63 new seats in the House and six in the Senate.  In fact, Republicans won about 55% of all Senate and Congressional seats up for election last year, with victories in 24 of the 37 Senate seats in play.  Republicans weren’t shy about what they wanted to do — cut spending and repeal Obamacare — and usually, when words (clearly expressed philosophy) meet numbers (electoral success) in politics, the result is a mandate.  If anybody in the current budget mess has a mandate, it’s Speaker John Boehner.  Independent voters want to stop Washington from spending so much money.

The trick, though, is how to use that mandate, and it’s tricky, again, because as important as independent voters are, they aren’t well-understood.  We know they want spending reduced, but we don’t know how much, and we don’t know what kind of ugliness they’ll tolerate to achieve it.  They’ve been polled to death, but that’s like assuming a lab experiment will repeat itself in the real world; the fact is that nobody really knows.  And again, this is a far from hegemonic group; it is by definition independent.  Adding to the mix is, essentially, how old the current district lines are.  For the most part, Congressional redistricting hasn’t been done in a decade, so whatever calculation and strategy went into them in 2001 (and believe me, a lot did) is out the window.

Which means that there’s a huge, HUGE amount of uncertainty hanging over these negotiations.  If House Republicans lose 25 seats, they lose the House, and the last three cycles have seen changes of 31 (2006), 21 (2008) and 63 (2010) seats.  They will rise or fall with independents.  Obama will too.  In 2012, 22 of the 32 seats up for election are held by Democrats (I’m counting Lieberman and Sanders as Democrats), and any hope of retaining their majority depends on retaining independents.

One reason that the 1997 balanced budget, Medicare reform, and tax cut deals were possible — even an afterthought — was that both sides knew where they stood.  Bill Clinton had been reelected with over 300 electoral votes, and was far more popular than his Congressional counterparts; House and Senate Republicans had taken the worst that the Democrats could throw at them, and still had majorities in both chambers of Congress.  Everyone knew the cards they were playing, and so the risks of not reaching agreement were much worse than the risks of cutting a deal.  That’s far from true here, and the very nature and power of the independent vote makes clarity unlikely anytime soon.  So if this week’s crisis makes you nervous, get ready:  this will be more the norm than the exception from now through the election.  Not because of polarization, or the media, or special interest politics, but because a tremendous amount of voting power is held by an extremely volatile, unaligned, and badly understood part of the electorate.

Bankers, Meet Mr. Jobs. If Now Now, Soon.

The iPhone 5 is expected to come to the market sometime this summer, and as usual with anticipated iPhone products, the rumor mill is vastly outpacing actual information.  One possible new function that’s creating a huge amount of buzz among iPhone fans is Near Field Communication (NFC), already in use in Europe and Asia.  NFC allows smart phones to function as credit cards, letting consumers pay in-person transactions with a swipe of their phone across a terminal.  This could go well past just retail  stores or restaurants; they could also be used to pay your parking meter, buy gasoline, or buy an airplane ticket, all with a flick of the wrist.

If it were to come out this summer, it’s almost certain the NFC smartphone would just layer on top of the existing credit card system.  Whichever credit card you already have on file with iTunes would simply be charged for each transaction.  And this would allow credit card companies to keep collecting the three cents they current charge for each dollar the transaction represents; which would allow the banks issuing the credit card companies to keep receiving the millions (or billions) in revenues from Mastercard and Visa; which would allow the national banking system a buffer from declining revenue elsewhere.  It’s tempting for many to think of all banks as variants of Goldman Sachs — rolling in vast amounts of cash, earned nearly invisibly.  But the truth is that most are struggling to get by.  One reason for the financial crisis was that banks were desperate to earn income, and they parked huge piles of cash in mortgage-backed securities because they seemed to provide both great returns and solid security.  Even before the crisis, fee-based activity — mortgage origination fees, ATM fees, payroll management fees — had replaced interest on lending as the source of most banks’ income.  And credit card fees were a big part of this.

So what happens when Mr. Jobs does what… well, what Mr. Jobs does, which which is use technology to subvert and reconfigure entire industries around the superior technology and design Apple can bring to the mix?  When the iPod was first introduced in September 2001, you still had to download music from a CD you’d bought in a store or through the mail.  But in 2004, Apple introduced iTunes, which cut out brick-and-mortar retail altogether and made Apple the dominant distributor of music.  By 2006, the biggest music retailer, Tower Records, had filed for bankruptcy, and the record labels themselves have been in spiraling decline.

Now, the credit card business isn’t the same as music.  Most people carry multiple credit cards for different purposes; it’s not as amenable to the kind of dominance iTunes currently enjoys in music.  But what happens when Apple decides it wants its crack at that three percent cut which the credit card companies take out of every transaction, and goes into the credit card business itself?  What happens to the banks when fees from their own proprietary cards start dropping? What happens to the credit card industry if Apple decides — as it has done with nearly every industry it has ever touched — that it can do it dramatically better than anyone is doing it now?  And what happens to the overall safety of the banking system if those fees can no longer replace declining bank income from traditional sources?

Stay tuned.

Sport, and Physics, and Risk

The National Football League and its players’ union are in the middle of a labor fight which might risk the 2011 season, but both sides need to pay attention to a longer-term risk that’s fundamental to professional football’s very viability:  will parents allow their kids to play the game as we find out more and more about its health risks?

We know football is a game of collisions, and this has put the game in some sticky situations; in the early 20th century, the deaths of a handful of players led to pressure to outlaw the sport, and Theodore Roosevelt himself brokered the deal that allowed it to survive.  But we’re finding out more and more about the consequences of those collisions: in particular, of frequent concussions.   Increasingly, former NFL players seem to be suffering dramatically higher incidences of depression, dementia, and chronic pain.  One former player, Dave Duerson, killed himself recently by shooting himself in the chest, specifically to preserve his brain for scientific research.  And, as scientists are getting a chance to study the brains of dead former players with troubling post-retirement mental health problems, they’re seeing a tremendous amount of damage that they trace back to the game itself.  Concussions are clearly the big part of the problem, but so is the culture of the game, the pressure to walk off injuries and keep playing.  A concussion is bad enough, but given adequate rest, brains can heal themselves.  The problem intensifies when players try to shake off the fog and get back on the field.  And coaches facing in-game pressure to win will almost always want to return their best players to the game and will look for any excuse to do it.

Will more of this be coming?  Almost certainly.  Consider the physics.  Collisions are basically releases of kinetic energy, the amount of energy that the colliding body represents while in motion.  The formula is this:

KE = ½ M V₂

Where M is mass and V is velocity.  Notice the V₂:  that means speed is even more important than mass in determining the violence of the collision.  Running 10 percent faster doesn’t make the hit 10 percent harder.  It makes it 21 percent harder.

Which means that bigger, faster athletes will hit not just a little harder, but a lot harder.  The average NFL defensive back in 1970 weighed 185 pounds and ran a 40-yard dash in 5.1 seconds.  His counterpart today weighs 215 pounds with a 4.5 second time in the 40 — 13.3 percent faster.  That means today’s defensive back, fully launched, will hit a receiver, running back or quarterback about 50 percent harder than in 1970.  Running just a tenth of a second faster would make the collision 56 percent harder.  And with more sophisticated training and nutrition, players are only getting bigger and faster.

The league is aware of the concussion issue, and spent much of last year cracking down on the most devastating hits, particularly head-to-head contact and hits to players who weren’t able to protect themselves; it also prohibited players who suffered concussions from playing until they’d recovered .  But this can only do so much.  Numbers are numbers, and in this case the numbers are dramatic.  Just as important are the hits that players take before they get to the NFL — in high school and college, where they’re trying to attract the attention of scouts who will get them the scholarship and then contract they want, and where ambitious coaches are looking for their next step up the ranks.  Remember, it’s not just one hit that does the big damage (unless it’s a truly devastating one), and high school and college teams are less likely to have doctors on the sideline who can evaluate a concussion and rule a player out of the game.  It’s the frequency of them, particularly before the player has recovered fully from the last one.

Why is this a big issue for the NFL?  Because big money sports all have this in common:  kids play them with their parents and with each other.  The NFL earned over $2 billion last year from its network deals.  Major league baseball earned $670 million for weekly, All-Star, and post-season games, but that doesn’t include individual team earnings from local broadcasting deals.  Even the National Hockey League makes over $500 million a year from television.  In contrast, professional wrestling — more entertainment than sport, and lacking that critical element of serving participants as well as spectators — made about $200 million from television last year.  Two billion to $200 million is a big, big dropoff.

And that’s the risk the league faces.  As more retired players get older and start manifesting concussion-related problems, and as medical science learns more about football and concussions, do parents stop allowing their kids to play anything rougher than flag (non-tackle recreational) football?  Does the threat of litigation force colleges to start dropping football programs?  And does the game as we know it become something that, knowing what we will probably know, you’d actually feel guilty watching?