The recent release of the comedy film "80 for Brady" marks an interesting breaking of precedent: while there have been many movies about football going back decades, this film marks the first time that one was made that is aimed squarely at the female viewing audience. As anyone who has seen the preview for the film knows, it stars four venerable female actors (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sally Field and Rita Moreno) and is more about the characters whacky antics as they try to get into the Super Bowl LI than football itself. Much has been made about how the film is loosely based on a real life group of elderly female football fans, and one of the film's producers is Tom Brady himself, who I'm sure is just fine with a movie being made about fans cheering for his greatness as quarterback.
The film appears to already be a moderate hit, opening at number two at the box office, but I think the NFL had a little more on their mind than box office returns when they went ahead with this film. Even someone who isn't a fan of football like me can't help but notice that the sport seems to be reaching out to female fans more and more in the past few years. In 2015, for the first time ever, a woman was hired as an assistant NFL coach, with more on the way. Women are also being hired as football TV announcers and referees. Even the fact that the planes that soar over the stadium this year will all be piloted by women for the first time ever has been widely reported on. Part of this is just due to more women breaking ground in general in the world, which is obviously a good thing.
But I think there's something else going on here: football in America is in an odd position. While the game is obviously very popular, its future maybe in doubt. While scandals like steroid use and players getting away with terrible behavior rocked the league in the past without really hurting the game, the discovery in 2004 that multiple concussions from on the field play could lead to severe mental problems, (known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) for the players, hurt the game like no other scandal before it. The fallout from that discovery, lead to a congressional investigation in 2009 in which the NFL was openly accused of knowing the potential damage of CTE on its players and covering it up. Eventually the league paid out a settlement of almost a billion dollars to retired players suffering from CTE. And while some attempts have been made to tamp down the brutal nature of the game, pile ons and tackles are such a big part of it that it seems really impossible to make it safe for players.
Recent polls show that the league has something to worry about: a 2018 Gallup poll found that while football remained the country's favorite sport, its numbers were slipping (from 43% saying it was their favorite in 2006 and 2007 to 37% in 2017). Furthermore, according to the website FiveThirtyEight, between 2016 and 2017 there was a decline of 12% in children playing in youth football leagues, and an NBC poll showed an increase in parents trying to discourage their sons from playing football between 2014 and 2018. And the important number in that poll is that women are more likely to discourage their sons than men are.
Putting it simply, the NFL's future resides on convincing the mothers of America that football is a safe game for their sons to play. So the league has been doing damage control by reaching out to female fans (and trying to create more), with moves like hiring female referees and coaches, and green lighting a movie for women about the joys of football fandom like "80 For Brady". Whether this strategy will work in the long term remains to be seen, (the NFL certainly has deep pockets to spend on improving its image). Personally, I'm with author Malcolm Gladwell when he asserts that football is a "moral abomination", but every Super Bowl Sunday, with all the media buildup it gets, people like me feel like we're, well, whispering in a wind tunnel.
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