Do you know how many U.S. teenagers died in August while or after playing football? The answer is seven. I find myself staring at that number, jaw a little slack. One is too many, but seven? In a month? There were 17 football-related deaths in all of 2021, 18 in 2019, 11 in 2018. (Because of Covid, in 2020, 16 states canceled or postponed their fall football season.) It feels inherently wrong to boil down anything as unspeakable as a teenage boy dying while playing a sport to a statistic. But when there are this many, you almost have no choice.
The NFL — the single most popular and powerful entity in American sports, and perhaps American entertainment — kicks off Thursday.
The NFL — the single most popular and powerful entity in American sports, and perhaps American entertainment — kicks off Thursday with the two-time defending champion Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Baltimore Ravens. It promises to be a riveting season for a league that has put most of its controversies, not to mention its unfortunate political period, behind it. The league brought in $20.47 billion in revenue last year, more than three times as much as it was bringing in when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took over, and not far off from his once-mocked $25 billion goal. Writers — including this one — who predicted catastrophe for the league over the last decade now look foolish. The NFL looks indestructible. Again.
The NFL is in the midst of a near-unprecedented run of strength, success and power, to the point that it feels like nothing can touch it. Those issues that had everyone so worried, however, still exist.
I will no longer make any sweeping dire predictions about the health of the NFL, and football in general: I’ve learned my lesson. But if you were looking for potential looming threats to the league’s omnipotence and dominance in the years to come, there are a few things I’m sure Goodell, a survivor if there ever was one, has thought about.
The first is a change in American television habits. The NFL eclipsed baseball as the most popular sport in the country decades ago because the game can be irresistible to watch on television, even among people who aren’t avid fans of the sport. As television took over in American households, football rose with it. As those habits have proven sticky, the NFL has benefited greatly as the media industry around it has gone through its most tumultuous period in half a century. In an age of streaming, advertisers are desperate for live television programming — shows you have to watch in real time rather than whenever you want, skipping past their ads — and thus the NFL has become even more powerful as the premier live television event.
But that may say more about this transitional period of streaming that the popularity of the sport itself. What if the entertainment industry figures out — or comes up with a technology breakthrough for — its streaming strategy that no longer values live television as much? Advertisers are paying through the teeth to be next to the NFL because nothing else can compare to it. But what if someday something does?
Because the NFL has embraced the world of legalized gambling more than any other sport — it’s impossible to watch a game without being bombarded with gambling ads — a gambling scandal could be a threat. The gambling industry is in a period of extreme transition: Already some sportsbooks are struggling and spending less. Meanwhile, calls to gambling addiction hotlines are through the roof, and, inevitably, the sports world is starting to deal with its own scandals, including players betting on their own teams. Football is uniquely positioned to have a big betting scandal involving one of its players: It’s the most popular sport to bet on, and its players on the whole make less money (and are considered more disposable) than those in other sports, and they don’t even have guaranteed contracts if they’re hurt or cut.
If you wanted to create an environment for a desperate (or addicted) player (or several players) to do something that could undercut the game’s inherent integrity, that would be how you would do it. I’m of the belief that a major betting scandal is going to hit sports soon, and hard. The NFL is the most likely place for that to happen.
I’m of the belief that a major betting scandal is going to hit sports soon, and hard. The NFL is the most likely place for that to happen.
There’s also the question about how much longer the commissioner will last. The NFL has no clear succession plan for him, and if he does leave, there will be an immediate target on the back of his successor. For all you might say about Goodell — and he’ll be booed at the NFL Draft for the rest of his career — he has been an undeniable moneymaker for the league and its owners. This is his job, of course: Sports commissioners are not benevolent arbiters for the sport; they’re just employees of the owners, existing solely to make them more money. But Goodell has proven consistently terrific at that, and impressively resilient. He’s as entrenched and established at that job as Pete Rozelle was, in an entirely different generation.
Goodell has been, for better or worse, the backbone of this league for more than 20 years. But he can’t stay forever. He’s 65 years old, and there have been rumblings that he may not return when his contract runs out after the 2027 season.
Concussions remain a pretty big problem for the NFL and its players. The league says it has cut down on concussions in recent years, but those numbers should be taken with rather large grains of salt: They’re provided by the league, first off, and it is widely assumed that players (and teams) do whatever they can to stay off the official concussion protocol list. The league has introduced new helmets, called “guardian caps,” that are supposed to help, but players don’t like to wear them and, besides, there’s only so much you can do to avoid concussions in a sport in which humans are constantly knocking their heads against each other. It has been a while since we had a high-profile retired player, like Junior Seau or Aaron Hernandez, come to a violent end only to be found to have had CTE. There will be another. There will be many more.
When we’re putting together a list of things that might weaken the NFL, we have to include Donald Trump.
One of the reasons the NFL has been able to stay out of the political realm is because the current president of the United States isn’t dragging them into it anymore. This was obviously not the case when then-President Trump called players who kneeled for social justice “sons of b-----s” and demanded owners drag them off the field. NFL owners famously had a huge, panicked meeting to figure out how to deal with Trump and only really shed themselves of him when he left office.
When we’re putting together a list of things that might weaken the NFL, we have to include Donald Trump.
Well, you may have heard: He may become president again. There are owners who would love for Trump, who promises tax cuts for billionaires, to return to office. But the league itself has thrived away from his chaos.
All that said, after years of my documenting perils for the league, it just gets stronger every year. Perhaps it is time to learn my own lesson: Maybe truly nothing can stop the NFL.
But those teen deaths remind us of the game’s inherent brutality and of just how much our love of the game costs.