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Not long after Randy Archibold became The Times’s sports editor in January of last year, the department held a meeting to determine what kind of stories it would tell in 2019. Reporters and editors had talked for years about a deeper look into football, something that went beyond the field.
It remained the most popular sport in the country and the most popular thing on TV — the Super Bowls were the 10 most-watched programs in the last decade — but fewer Americans were playing the game, statistics showed. The National Football League had also been mired in political controversy over Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality toward African-Americans during the national anthem that began in 2016.
Mr. Archibold believed it was the perfect time to bring together multiple strands of reporting the desk had done over the years to make an impactful statement.
Joe Drape, a Sports reporter, wrote in an internal memo that participation in high school football had fallen by 75,000 players from 2008 to 2017. For the N.F.L., that was both its future work force and audience.
“How do we get a 360 degree look at how football is shifting and what it means now and in the future? How do we present it?” Mr. Drape wrote.
The result was On Defense, a composite look at football in America, told in 10 parts. It was a collaboration across different desks in the Times newsroom, drawing on journalists from Graphics and Photography.
The series launched with a report in November detailing how football leaders at the professional and amateur levels had acknowledged an existential threat facing the sport, and the measures they were taking to invigorate enthusiasm at a grass-roots level.
Data compiled by The Times from the National Federation of State High School Associations showed that fewer boys were playing the game in nearly every state, including football factories like Texas and Ohio.
That consistency was surprising, said Quoctrung Bui, a graphics editor who worked on the project.
“Usually across the country, when you see a pattern, you see some states offset the other states,” he said.
The final article in the series published last week. It looked at the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated Super Bowl champion. Three former teammates were diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a brain disease associated with head trauma that can be diagnosed only after death. More than 100 former N.F.L. players’ brains have been diagnosed with the disease.
It’s not only the physical dangers that threaten the sport’s future. Football isn’t immune to the forces shrinking the youth player pools of other sports, including specialization, other extracurricular options and simple disinterest.
On Defense told nuanced stories about a sport that was fading in some communities but was also maintaining a certain resilience.
Ken Belson, who covers the business of the N.F.L., made his first reporting trip to the East Texas town of Marshall in 2014, when the school district was ending tackle football for seventh graders because of the cost and the high rate of injuries.
He returned two years later to report that parent organizations started their own youth tackle leagues because they wanted the game back.
He returned a third time last year, for On Defense. The school district had brought back the seventh-grade tackle program it had ended five years before.
In Marshall, football served as a unifying force, as it did in other communities The Times covered.
In another segment, on a United States military base in Japan, the game was a tie to back home.
From McCool Junction, Neb., Calla Kessler, a Times photographer, reported on the importance of six-man football, a version of the sport that allows small schools to field teams.
On Defense also found that communities can clutch tightly to the tradition and structure that football brings, while also taking new precautions against brain injury.
Mr. Drape found that in Maria Stein, Ohio, where nearly half the boys at Marion Local High School still play football, defying a steep decline in the state. At Marion Local, teams practice in pads only twice a week and never under full-contact rules.
On Defense showed how the sport offers opportunities that others don’t. Mr. Drape called football “a very democratic sport.”
“You can be slow and fat, small, light, smart, not so smart, and you can show up in ninth grade and there is a spot for you,” he said.
And despite unease with football’s spectacular violence, the TV ratings have remained strong.
How we live football, in the words of Matthew Futterman, the sports editor who shepherded On Defense, “is super complicated.”
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Exploring the Complicated State of Football in America - The New York Times
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