I’m your stereotypical queer girl in a lot of ways—I wear flannel shirts all the time, I don’t wear much makeup, and I can’t actually remember the last time I brushed my hair. But there’s one way in which I don’t fit those stereotypes at all: I hate sports. With a passion.

And yet, I’m writing an article about the National Football League. Has hell frozen over? Have I finally had some football spirit knocked into me? No. I’m just excited (read: ecstatic) that the NFL probably isn’t going to last much longer.

We still call baseball the “American pastime,” but football is overwhelmingly more popular. In fact, if you don’t have even a middling interest in the sport, as I know from experience, you might find yourself ridiculed for it. After all, what’s more American than football? Obviously, if you don’t like it, you’re a communist. Or a terrorist. Probably both.

Football is so popular, it’s hard to imagine it ever fading away, but I am positive that the NFL is truly on its way out of our society.

Let’s start with where it should have ended: the fact that this sport is brutal on its players. The concussions are bad enough and tend to get a lot of attention. But concussions have also been shown to be the cause of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in players. For those that don’t know, CTE is a disease which causes behavioral and mood changes, cognitive function problems, and a bunch of other problems you can read about here, including a possible rise in suicide rates of those suffering from the disease.

For a long time, we’ve ignored these problems as a necessity of the game, which it is. But our society seems to finally be coming to its senses and realizing that, no, watching people get their brains knocked around in their skulls (among other horrifying injuries) is not actually that fun. Or at least, it isn’t fun enough to make up for those injuries.

The National Football League is losing viewers and revenue, for a variety of reasons. The brutality of the game is only one of them. Another is likely the fact that most millennials just aren’t that into sports. I mean, come on, why watch football when you can listen to Quvenzhané Wallis sing “Tomorrow” on repeat for literally ever?

But I’d say the most important factor in the NFL’s likely doom is the way it disrespects its players. Specifically, the African American players who make up 70% of players. Colin Kaepernick was famous for playing football. Now, he’s infamous for daring to protest police brutality against African Americans, among other issues. Since then, player protests have become common enough that ESPN actually has a series of articles on them.

You’d think that since the NFL has such a high percentage of African American men playing their games, that the league might bother to address the issues their players are calling attention to. But the NFL doesn’t seem at all interested in supporting its players. Instead, there’s been talk of benching players who kneel.

Considering how much of the NFL is made up of African American players, the league is taking a serious risk in not taking these issues seriously. It’s gambling on the assumption that African American players care more about their careers than their civil rights. And perhaps, for now, players are willing to put up with that.

But how much longer do you think they’ll stay, when the organization they work for is not only putting their mental and physical health at risk and ignoring the issues that are important to its players but also punishing those players for exercising their right to protest?

In addition to player protests, many viewers and prominent figures (including our sham of a president himself) have attacked the NFL for not doing more to discourage players from kneeling during the anthem. So in this moment, we have people who aren’t happy with the brutal nature of the game, people who are protesting in the name of civil rights, people who are protesting because they don’t give a damn about civil rights and just want their precious football games to be uncomplicated, and people who just aren’t that really into football, all choosing to do other things besides tune into the game every Sunday night.

This leads us back to the NFL's revenue problems. The fewer people watching, the less revenue flowing into the organization, and the harder it will be to keep the whole thing afloat. It’s possible that the league might be able to fix its problems, by tweaking the game and, maybe, just maybe, not brushing off the concerns of its players.

But it’s also possible that football just isn’t a sport for the modern population, a population which is increasingly more critical of not only its football league, but its businesses, politicians, and even well-loved celebrities. If the NFL is to continue, it won’t do so without some serious effort and a major change in the image.