derail us. the thing about edward snowden, he did bring all this to life. what it has done for a lot of americans is you now know the federal government is keeping an eye on all of us. they re tracking our phone calls, where we go with our phones. it s all being stored. they say we re not going to tap into it unless you do something wrong. just the fact the government is tracking us has a lot of people upset. all right. meanwhile, coming up straight ahead on this show, it s the best story you ll hear all day. you have a police officer seeing a kid playing football by himself, and he does something about it. how this moment changed that boy s life forever. and pot? no more dangerous than booze? that s according to the president of the united states. it s a brand new interview sparking debate this morning. sparking. today we re going to play a little game which 4g lte map
three more on the schedule for today. the nfl isn t actually going to kick off until this coming weekend. actually, thursday night on nbc, a little plug there for the company, when baltimore visits denver. soon enough, thousands of high school teams all across the country are going to be duking it out for local bragging rights under those famous friday night lights. supposedly baseball is our national past time, but that is not what people say these days. a poll from earlier this year shows that more than twice as many americans prefer pro football to major league baseball. when you then add in college football, it s a complete landslide. when it comes to sports in america, football is king. the question, though, is whether its reign is in jeopardy. there are a lot of reasons that baseball isn t as popular today as it used to be. i have my own explanation. people finally realized how boring it is. there was also the player strike in the mid- 90s. that probably had something to do with
less able to deal with his injuries, but particularly starts in 1989 he kban to experience insomnia and depression. his personality changed to the point where i had to pinch myself sometimes. i didn t recognize the person whom i d married. i mean, evan, this is how the physical nature of football, the hard hits, the concussions can affect a player, not just while he s playing but for years, for decades to come, for the rest of his life. when i see a hard hit now, i find myself thinking of stories like that. when you talk to people like brett boyd or some of the other people i know, i ll call them up say, hello, how are you? they say, hey, evan, how are you? let me get the notes from the last time i spoke to you. there s memory loss. there s physical pain. also, a lot of these guys with the settlement probably
i think the question is, and this settlement does not address this and not yet has addressed this, can this sport be fundamentally safe to play? at the high school level, at the college level, at the nfl level. can the changes that have been made or future changes make the sport safe? that is still to be determined. when you have the president of the united states who looks at all this and says, i wouldn t want my kid playing football, it makes me wonder how many other parents out there hey, you can play soccer, you can play football, you can play lacrosse. do one of those two, don t play football. i wonder how many are thinking that. i think that s the nfl s fear, that conversation is starting to happen in suburban households. that conversation is starting to happen in households where it never happened before. what sport do you want to play? soccer? you have concussion issues, but the severity of the injuries are not anything close to the nfl. that conversation scares the infor
basic level and try to understand why these two weekends of the year tens of millions of americans spend months of their lives just waiting for these weekends. baseball used to be the national past time. i think football has supplanted it. i wonder, why? what is it about football that has this appeal? i think everybody wants to identify with a winner. you have this hope that every time this year you ve got the winner in the game. i think with college, there s an identity. people who didn t go to alabama, you know, will drive down five days before the game and hang out in tuscaloosa to be part of the atmosphere, to be part of that identity. i think that really does drive the passion. it s certainly a sport you can wrap your head around once a week, too. you don t have to follow it on a single daily basis. that really does sort of gin up the stakes a little bit. that one day a week where you can wrap yourself in your team. even if you didn t go to the school, you can wrap yourself in t