USA TODAY International Edition
FOOTBALL’S DOWN BUT NOT OUT
Ratings slip and dementia is headline news, but the NFL is still super in America
Like the players on the field every Sunday ( and Monday, and Thursday), pro- football is taking hit after hit. Its television ratings, which seemed capable of going only higher, were down in the season’s first half and again in the divisional playoffs relative to a year ago. Injuries are plaguing the quality of play, overexposure is outpacing interest, and stories continue to circulate about retired players’ premature dementia.
Nonetheless, don’t weep for the NFL, which will own Sunday as the country re- enacts the annual Super Bowl extravaganza. The game’s hold on the popular culture, even if it has slipped a tad, remains unparalleled.
Having sworn off pro football, I allowed my curiosity to lure me back to the televised action of the conference championships. What did I notice?
Endless commercials, some of them mildly entertaining but all of them disruptive to the games having any flow. The upside? While the two conference title games yielded no last- minute drama, they did offer plenty of the athleticism, strategy and complexity that can make football hard to resist. Also conspicuous were the violent collisions, of course, which are as central to football as water to swimming. ‘ WHAT I KNOW NOW’ It’s this facet of football that has onetime football great Bo Jackson saying he wished he had never played. The former Los Angeles Raiders running back told USA TODAY last month: “If I knew back then what I know now, I would have never played football. … The game has gotten so violent, so rough. We’re so much more educated on this CTE ( chronic traumatic encephalopathy) stuff, there’s no way I would ever allow my kids to play.”
As if to punctuate Jackson’s headline grabber, Mark Gastineau, a quarterback- sacking New York Jets star in the 1980s, revealed a week later that he suffers from dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
Polling data show that more parents would not let their sons play football — a figure that jumped from 22% in 2015 to 31% in 2016, according to polling by the Public Religion Research Institute ( PRRI). In step with rising awareness of football causing brain injuries, youth football participation rates nosedived earlier this decade.
All these factors must be a headache for the NFL. So, too, must be the growing popularity of other sports and entertainments on a cultural landscape ever more scattered and ever less conducive to any widely shared interest.
For instance, soccer — the other “football” — has risen in popularity as a youth participation sport and spectator experience. Among those ages 18- 29, it tops the list of sports played while growing up, according to PRRI. Football comes fourth, with just 10% of young adults naming that as the sport they played most often as kids, behind soccer ( 24%), basketball ( 22%) and baseball or softball ( 14%). OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER You might be bothered by these trend lines if you’re part of the large subset of Americans who worry that the country has grown too soft, too “feminine.” This narrative resonates strongly with those who voted for President Trump. Same for football’s promoters and defenders, who praise the sport for building character and providing a last bastion of rugged masculinity.
Having played as a youth, I agree that football can be a character- building experience, not to mention fun. But does it build character to watch large, fast men smash into each other? That’s the more relevant question, given the yawning gap between the number of people who participate and the number who watch. If anything, our character is called into question if we get our thrills from a game that few of us play, and whose gladiators often limp into retirement with debilitating injuries to their bodies and brains.
These problems, combined with football’s association with sexual aggression against women, are why a friend who was formerly a big fan has come to see the NFL not only as damaged goods but also as damaging goods. He won’t be watching on Sunday.
But a huge number of people will be ( more than 110 million if this year’s Super Bowl can match last year’s). Nearly four in 10 of us name football as our favorite sport, the PRRI survey finds, a figure more than three times that of any other sport. Our culture has too much invested in football — too much emotion, memory, myth and money — to imagine a sudden change in its status.
Its recently acquired dings and scratches notwithstanding, “The Shield,” as the league calls its brand, will still glitter on Super Bowl Sunday. The manliest of American sports is likely to remain a huge part of our culture for a long time to come.