Christine Brennan, bless her, is an evolutionist. She thinks that if someone tried introducing football to America now, an America that has progressed significantly since the late nineteenth century, we’d all in unison say no.
For instance, on the high school level:
If parents and administrators living in a 21st century world without football were told [about the destructive violence of] this prospective new sport, they never would allow it to begin.
And on the university level? She doesn’t say, but you figure an intellectual institution informed of an almost-certain degree of brain damage, no less, to the student players of this just-invented game would shrink back, appalled.
I mean, that’s by Brennan’s reckoning… If you ask ol’ UD, she’ll tell you that things like football, hockey, and NASCAR are and will continue to be massively popular because they hurt people (“[Football] is literally killing the men who play it.”). Failing to see the matador gored is like going all the way to Tromsø and failing to see the Northern Lights.