20-Year Prospect
Football will still be around in twenty years because Americans just love to identify themselves with groups of large, aggressive, and (hopefully) victorious men. You, however, will not be a football player that far into the future, for the simple reason that your body, your brain, or both will have failed you by then.
People in the know go back and forth about the average length of a pro football player's career: the numbers range everywhere from three years to almost twelve. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell goes with nine years as the average career length...although it isn't like Goodell is a poster boy for truthfulness, given the role he played in the Ray-Rice-punched-a-woman scandal.
Whether you're in the NFL for three years or for twelve, you're going to get injured, and some of those injuries will be so bad that they could end your career prematurely. Special teams players get hurt the most, generally bustin' an ankle, a foot, or a leg bone once every fifty plays.
And then there are the concussions. Hoo, boy, does the NFL have a problem on its hands here. A recent round of autopsies of fifty dead ex-NFL players found indications of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which doctors believe is caused by football stars getting whacked in the head too often. Several living ex-NFL players have also been diagnosed with the disease, and are plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging the NFL hid the links between the sport of football and brain damage.
As bad as the situation is, football will survive concussions. It will survive Ray Rice and Roger Goodell. There's just too much money in the NFL for the sport of football to go away.
You, however, will not be a football player two decades from now. Instead, you'll probably be a drooling zombie in a wheelchair. May the millions of dollars you took home in pay as a football player comfort you then.