09/24/2026
THIS IS WORTH THE READ...TRUST ME
America Needs Its Boys to Play Football
By Ben Sasse
The Wall Street Journal — Opinion
Friday, September 4, 2026
Fall is here, football is back, and America’s boys need to play it and be shaped by it.
As the son of a football coach, I’m admittedly biased. As a dad who has spent the past month driving a high-school freshman to two-a-day, often 100-degree practices, I’m deliriously invested. But you don’t have to be a football fanatic to grasp that today, for 12- to 18-year-old boys, this sport has never been more important. While controversy surrounds the embarrassingly blurry line between college football and the National Football League, our culture needs to take a moment to commend and steward the glorious tradition of high-school football.
Across cultures and time, four major institutions have formed young men: family, religion, work and war. By demanding effort and sacrifice, each of these molded boys into men. Parents raised sons to be husbands and fathers. Scriptures demanded grappling with human nature, sin and salvation. Work looked at needs, and forged character and grit. War—or more broadly, the obligation to protect your community—harnessed strength as service.
Today, war and work have faded.
Thankfully, violence has been pushed to the periphery of most societies to a degree ancient and medieval people never conceived possible. The world is still dangerous and humanity still capable of unspeakable evil, but most neighborhoods bear little resemblance to lawless frontiers of old. Our continental nation is blessed with good neighbors and big oceans, and most violence is constrained through ordered liberty.
This isn’t cheap: The men and women who defend us pay a steep price. There’s always the risk of imagining peace is the natural, autopilot order of things, rather than a stunning achievement that requires ongoing vigilance. But it’s a blessing that less than 1% of the population serves in America’s all-volunteer military.
Unfortunately, work has also faded as a formative experience. When I was growing up in Nebraska, detasseling corn was a rite of passage. We woke at 4:30 a.m. to slog through fields from cold morning dew through to blazing midday heat. Today, that Cornhusker tradition has been rendered all but extinct by new technologies. Farm country isn’t the only place this is happening. Teenage work has been evaporating across the nation since the 1980s. Only 35% of teenagers had a summer job this year. Technology is on pace to eliminate many remaining starter jobs like flipping burgers and running checkouts. This is economic reality, and on the whole it leads to greater prosperity, but we should acknowledge the trade-off.
As war and work have faded, two new institutions have filled the void: bureaucratized schooling and digital media. On net, both are developments for the worse. Institutionalized childhood is soul-crushing. In the early 20th century, we industrialized nearly everything, but a great way to manufacture cars is a rotten way to shape souls. An acorn doesn’t become an oak on an assembly line. Factory-model education keeps young men passive, indoors, and on “receive” mode. Kids are naturally inquisitive, but modern schooling is too often designed to anesthetize curiosity.
The doom scroll makes matters worse. Digital media has a profoundly negative effect on young men. Temptations to distraction and addiction are real. According to the Institute for Family Studies, 27% of men 18 to 29 are daily p**n consumers, and almost as many now gamble daily. They are withdrawing from the real world into loneliness and helplessness. Sixty-one percent report feeling “little control over the things that happen” in their lives. That’s a slow-burning crisis.
Young men need to celebrate and harness strength. Toxic masculinity isn’t the entirety of masculinity. We need young men full of energy, ambition and growing self-mastery. Society needs strong men.
Football is a character-forming institution that channels strength. In a world of instant gratification, it teaches perseverance through early practices and aching muscles. In an era of isolation, football creates community. It forms brotherhood through both misery and joy. In a culture of passivity, football privileges action. In times of peace, football prepares us for war.
Football simultaneously celebrates and constrains violence. It teaches the difference between boyhood and manhood, between self-indulgence and self-restraint. Football done right creates the conditions for less, rather than more, violence in bars.
For four quarters, offense, defense and special teams inflict maximum damage within the precisely bounded parameters of the game. When guided by seasoned coaches, football punishes hits after the whistle. It prohibits targeting defenseless receivers. It shames bullying in the locker room. It scorns those who won’t shake hands with an opponent postgame.
To harness the necessary violence properly, teams ingrain virtues of delayed gratification and self-sacrifice. That’s the value of one more rep on the bench when your head wants to give up but your muscles haven’t given out.
That’s the reward for the pain of development. Young men, faced with a choice to strive and suffer on behalf of teammates, build virtue not chiefly through deliberation but through action. Football forms and honors such habits.
The Apostle Paul never picked up a blitz. He never recovered an onside kick. But he taught that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character. And that’s something that will be rightly cheered under Friday night lights all across the country this fall. Paul was in the more important business of saving souls. The gridiron offers no eternal comfort, but East of Eden we’ll always need strong and selfless men. That’s why we owe our boys football.
Mr. Sasse is a columnist for the Journal and our Free Expression newsletter. He served as a U.S. senator from Nebraska, 2015–23.
