Adaptation

With thousands of head-injury lawsuits filed against the NFL, and Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard telling CBS Sports that he believes the game will no longer exist in 30 years, it does raise the question about the sport's future.

At this moment, football doesn't look like it's going anywhere, with the enormous profit the NFL makes each year and its popularity still strong among fans.  

Yet, this is the precise moment to start to think and believe in what now seems unimaginable – the end of football. It's what empires fail to do just before they collapse.

Perhaps a better way to think about football's future is not the end of football, but the end of football as we know it. Like former empires, companies and industries have all but disappeared because they failed to adapt.

Change is constant and inevitable.

Good companies such as Apple seem to understand this. They change because they know that even if they don't change the public and their appetites are changing, and the only way to give the public what it wants is to understand what they want and . . . change.

Henry Ford, a man who hated change yet changed American society with his Ford Model T, grudgingly accepted the idea of giving the public what they wanted; but only after his son, Edsel, spent years begging him to change or risk losing market share.

Once he did, customers started buying cars in colors other than black.

Clearly, the body-slamming, head-banging game of football has changed since its beginnings when helmets and padding were not required. And it's changing now, but will it adapt?

Change is likely to be more challenging for football then say Apple because it has to become safer while at the same time maintaining the sport’s hard physics that makes following the game so exciting.

Good businesses welcome challenges because it makes them better businesses. History shows societies progress when they embrace change and fail when they ignore it.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell seems to understand this. He told CBS's Face the Nation on Super Bowl weekend: "The game of football always evolves. Throughout the decades we've always made changes to our game to make it safer for the players and more exciting for the fans."

As long as football continues to make changes, it should be around a long time.