Mixed Feelings about High School and College Football

I was watching some of the college football games on TV this past Saturday and understand why so many of us are mesmerized by the sport.  It's all a kind of adventure story with action, interspersed with breaks to analyze what's going on and what will (or should) happen next, depending on which team you're rooting for.  Unfortunately, football is also very violent, taking a punishing toll on the body.  I remember in the eleventh grade in high school as one of my social studies teachers one day went on an anti-football rant, decrying its violence and effects on young people's bodies, often limiting and hobbling them later in life as well as posing a significant danger of brain damage.  The kids in the class, most of them ardent football fans if not players themselves, took this lecture all in stride seeing that this dude was widely regarded as one of the "cool" teachers.  At the time I was on the track team and the football team was doing spring "conditioning" for the next fall in the track's interior...I put that word in quotes because all they seemed to be doing was hitting each other as hard as they could, further weakening their bodies for future injury.  And that indeed happened, with many key players later sidelined for the season as the varsity football team in my senior year went 0-9-1.  That fall, while "my" team was losing game after game, I went to Hollywood Memorial Hospital for a scheduled hernia repair operation...which would turn out to be the only general anesthesia surgery I would undergo until 2021 when I had open heart surgery to replace a defective heart valve and repair an aortic aneurism.  I shared my recovery room with two other teenage boys, both suffering leg injuries from playing football, each kid a couple of years younger than me.  Their buddies would traipse in and out of the room treating them like war heroes.  Saturday night's South Carolina at Tennessee game reminded me of that time as the crazy-ass fans in the stands would wildly cheer whenever their team put an extremely hard hit on the other while they would be respectfully silent when someone went down and couldn't get back up, having to be carted off the field.  I think the Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series may have at least unconsciously derived from this duplicity from fans of wanting violence in a controlled setting and then acting like it's a shame when someone gets hurt (or, in the Hunger Games, killed).  So yes, I like a good story, and football can provide some good ones.  Still, I like to think I'm not quite as bloodthirsty about it as some of my fellow fans are...