Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford and his wife Kelly recently became parents of twin girls, an event that presents an opportunity to consider an interesting question, or, at least, a very typical question made interesting by attendant circumstances. When an athlete has a child, many assume– for plenty of good reasons– that the child will follow in his or her parent’s athletic footsteps. That speculation is all the more present when both parents are athletes, of course, as anyone who remembers the Steffi Graf-Andre Agassi wedding (or the Curry family) can attest.

Stafford’s sport, football, has begun a fall from grace in the public eye, and, we’re told, youth football will dry up as parents decline to permit their children to participate in a sport that now almost seems designed to induce lasting brain trauma.

On the other hand, there has been a push for increased inclusiveness in sports, from openly gay or transgender athletes to women pushing their way into male-dominated leagues. Little League World Series star Mo’ne Davis sparked a new drama series on network television, and eloquent and mortally conscious baseball observer Sam Miller wrote after the Chicago Cubs’ curse-breaking World Series win that the chance to see a female player in the major leagues was the only likely historical baseball event worth living for.

These two arguably diverging trends return us to the subject of the Stafford twins and the speculative question at the heart of this post: Is it more likely that one or both of the Stafford girls grows up to play football, or that football essentially doesn’t exist by the time they grow up?