Wanna make football 10x safer? Take away helmets or go back to soft helmets with no facemask.
Football is an interesting case study because of how the structure of the game fosters lack of sympathy for the individual. What I mean is, football has 11 players on the field, not 5 like basketball. Furthermore, there's 53 guys on an active game roster (more in college obviously) so the concept of individuality is lost. Johnny Wide Receiver shatters his knee, and we don't really care that much. Next man up. Contrast this to basketball where if someone tears their ACL on the court, we intensely sympathize as if his family has been murdered. On top of this, the helmet further masks the individual and contributes to fans caring about the team, not the individual. We cannot see football player's faces so most fans cannot feel the type of compassion for a specific player like we can in basketball or baseball or soccer. The NFL is a hyper-successful league in terms of popularity and its popularity has next to nothing to do with star power. NFL is the only league that can completely overcome any team's star player getting injured (possibly QB's excluded) and not take even the slightest ratings hit.
Extrapolating this out, it's my opinion that subconsciously, fans are much, much more comfortable watching a player get internal injuries (i.e. concussions) with helmets with facemasks than we would be watching them get their faces bloodied up if they were sans facemask with a soft helmet. I really think that. Seeing a player with no facemask -- being able to have an unobstructed view of the pain and anguish on his bloody face -- would shatter the paradigm of viewing football players as plug-and-play cogs in a wheel that is the team; suddenly the players would become real people with real pain. In other words, even though the injuries would be much less severe and life-threatening with no helmets / soft helmets (broken nose or gashed up face vs massive concussion and head trauma), fans are more comfortable seeing mega hits that cause "invisible" damage to players.
People act like they're all concerned about concussions and the long-term effects of head shots, but fan/media actions say otherwise. If people were REALLY concerned, they'd call for a return to soft helmets. The modern football helmet is a weapon. Players would not lead with their head with a soft helmet. They couldn't -- they'd break their neck and die right then and there. It would take a generation, but re-introducing softer helmets would make the game much, much safer.
