The College Fix

President Barack Obama is a big Chicago Bears fan, he’s made no secret of that. But would he let his kid play the sport? Maybe not.

In a recent interview with The New Republic, Obama said that “if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football” because of the game’s physical toll.

“I think those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence,” he told the magazine in an interview. “In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”

Then the president zeroed in on college football.

“I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.”

All we can say is thank goodness Obama’s not a hockey fan.

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