NFL reality check
This isn’t your grandfather’s national professional football league anymore, kiddio. The headline alone kinda gives the game away.
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The NFL is all about DEI. While its bread and butter is the ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest world of the players, who all have to be men, the league has decided that everything else is subject to experimentation. While players can only play and earn the big bucks if they are good, and they are dropped the second they are of no use to a team, the front office can be packed with people who take up cubicle space and help the league check boxes for the TIDES organization (The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport—M).To be sure, the league has been careful not to let much of this show. On Sunday, the public mostly sees an over-the-top display of patriotism and a couple of hours of wall-to-wall toxic masculinity. Just what America wants.
In the process, the league makes millions for the teams, the players, the networks, and, most importantly, the sponsors. In fact, you can pretty much assume that the product the NFL puts out is designed at every turn to be a cash-generating machine. In a stadium or on TV on game day, if it moves, someone sponsors it, and the NFL is making money.
In 1984, Lesley Visser of CBS Sports was the first woman to handle the sideline reporting duties for NFL games. Her primary job was to get real-time injury reports during games, but over the years that role has morphed into something else. Network producers, hoping to appeal to the more casual fan, now try to create mid-game narratives or storylines. The sideline reporter, who is now usually a woman, is charged with putting the focus on these storylines throughout the game if she can. Well, that, in addition to asking totally disgruntled head coaches how they feel things are going as they try to escape her for the locker room at halftime.
From a marketing and media perspective, we’ve been told that the primary reason the league wants female sideline reporters is to help grow the female demographic in the fan base. In other words, it’s a business decision. There’s no question the female fan base has grown over the years, but I have yet to meet a woman who likes football because she saw a female sideline reporter on TV.
The same is true for those halftime displays of patriotism. The reason you see them is not because Roger Goodell and his staff are model patriots; it’s because they know that their brand is wrapped in the red, white, and blue, literally. It doesn’t hurt that the league has monetized all of that by securing million-dollar sponsorships from the American armed forces and other adjacent organizations like USAA.
Do you really think those camo uniforms, flyovers, honor guards, and soldiers unfurling an American flag on the field all happen because the NFL cares about the country? Consider this: a year ago, because of the government shutdown, the NFL suspended such activities because the Pentagon’s budget was frozen. In other words, when the money ran out, so did the NFL’s demonstrations of patriotism.
The NFL is big business, and you can’t begrudge the owners for being unabashed capitalists. The country does love pro football, and people very willingly and gladly shell out their hard-earned money to enjoy what the NFL is selling. For the most part, it’s a healthy two-way business relationship where both sides feel they’re getting value out of it.
But to be clear, in the words of the great Michael Corleone in The Godfather, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
Same-same, then, with the decision to stop tuning in and/or watching the NFL altogether. TPTB in the NFL’s executive board rooms think they can do without normal, patriotic American males watching and attending their games? I’d label that an open-and-shut case of Fucking Around, myself. It’s high time they damned well Found Out.
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