The NFL Faces A New Threat: An Evaporating Insurance Market

As the National Football League gets ready for championship weekend with a thrilling pair of games to decide who advances to the Super Bowl, a threat lurks. Contact sports, most acutely football, are facing a stark, new threat: an evaporating insurance market that is fundamentally altering their economics, squeezing and even killing off programs faced with higher costs and a scarcity of available coverage, an ESPN/Outside the Lines investigation has found. "People say football will never go away, but if we can’t get insurance, it will," Jon Butler, Pop Warner’s executive director, lamented to colleagues after discovering that just one carrier was willing to cover the organization for head trauma, according to a person who was present.