David Michael Miller
Football season is over.
It ended in spectacular fashion on Sunday night as the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots in what was probably the best-played and most interesting game in the history of the event.
And yet the game’s ratings were the lowest of any Super Bowl in eight years.
I watched it because I was at a Super Bowl party and I had already eaten all the Fritos and dip a guy can eat and there just wasn’t much else to do. Also, the game was on four screens around the house, so it could not be escaped. And I’ll admit that it was an entertaining game with some creative commercials. During one of those ads I learned that when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about the value of service, he was really talking about the value of a massive pickup truck.
But outside of the Super Bowl, I did not watch a single football game in its entirety. In fact, if you stitched together all the minutes of games I caught here and there maybe it would add up to a game and a half.
This is no small matter for a guy whose crucial formative years were spent basking in the era of Vince Lombardi, a guy who actually remembers watching the Ice Bowl on TV, and a guy who owns a share of Packer stock.
But I’m not alone. Viewership for Packer games was down by nine percent. While Packer fans will point out, with much justification, that this might be called the “Hundley Effect,” that nine percent decline matched the overall viewership drop off for the entire league during the regular season. And it followed an eight percent decline from the season before.
Analysts blame all kinds of things for this — including a broader drop in viewers of traditional scheduled broadcast programming, the short attention spans of younger viewers, too many uninteresting games, and the controversy over players taking a knee during the National Anthem.
All of those explanations are plausible, but for me it was concussions and injuries in general that turned me off. I just can’t justify eating chips and dip while watching guys scramble their brains and crush their limbs for my entertainment.
The evidence is overwhelming. Of 111 brains of deceased NFL players examined, all but one had evidence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. CTE can lead to trouble with concentration, memory loss, moodiness, depression and suicide. It has ruined or shortened the lives of countless players. In fact, the NFL has settled a lawsuit resulting in a billion dollars in payouts to hundreds of players. Even that is regarded by some as the NFL getting off cheap. The NFL has agreed to pay that billion dollars over the next 65 years, while the league generates about $14 billion in revenue every year.
Even more troubling for the NFL, parents are taking notice. Participation in youth football is down 2.5 percent over the last decade. While that’s not a massive dropoff, it is almost certain to accelerate as more parents become aware of the risks.
Illinois lawmakers have even introduced a bill to ban football for kids under 12. “The more years you play, the greater the risk of CTE,” said Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Legacy Foundation when he spoke in support of the bill. “The only way to [shorten] the years of tackle football is to prevent it at the beginning.”
To make matters worse, it is probably a safe assumption that it is more affluent, better-educated parents who will make the safe choice for their sons. Seventy percent of NFL players today are black men. Think down the road a few years. With all we’re learning about brain injury, and with all we know about life choices open to young black men as opposed to their more affluent white counterparts, where do you think that percentage is headed? Who do you think will be taking all these risks so television networks, NFL executives, pizza companies and breweries can make a fortune — while a mostly white audience cheers on the gladiators? If black lives matter, then what matters more than black brains? As a fan, do you really want to be complicit in all this?
Every time you tune into a game, your eyeballs get counted and your very presence in front of the screen is a commodity that’s bought and sold. There is no better way to fight back than to simply not watch the games.
And here’s the thing — in my season of boycott, I did not miss football at all. When I might have been watching the games, I instead went for walks or bike rides or read a book. It was no sacrifice. It got to the point where I started to forget a game was even going on. I just didn’t care.
What started out as an experiment to see if I could do without football became a way of life. There is nothing more threatening to the NFL, and nothing more hopeful for athletes who could succeed just as well at a safer sport, than if millions of erstwhile fans reached that same conclusion.
Near the end of a poignant and compelling piece in the New York Times, NFL wife Emily Kelly writes, “But when all those big hits happened and the fans cheered, did they cheer in spite of knowing a man just greatly increased his risk for dementia?”
I can no longer watch and cheer.
Pitchers and catchers report next week.
