Origins
While the game was first played by the sons of the American elite in the 1860s—Princeton and Rutgers held the first intercollegiate football contest in New Brunswick, New Jersey—the professional variation of the football was "scorned and ridiculed by the college crowd," according to Keith McCellan, author of The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football.At the heart of the upper class's derision was the notion that players were selling their skills for money, which was considered distasteful because of antiquated distinctions between professional and amateur sportsmanship imported from Britain, Crepeau wrote. To keep the illusion of amateurism alive, owners would pay players under the table and allow them to play under pseudonyms. Blue-collar workers, however, didn't care about these distinctions; the aggressive game became increasingly popular in America's Midwestern factory towns.You can be primal, tribal in a way that's simply not socially acceptable in any other context.
Regardless, fans were rabid from the get-go: when an iconic "golden boy" named Red Grange first signed with the Chicago Bears in 1925, police had to restrain the crowd from mobbing him. While many say that TV was what gave professional football its power over American culture, this was the true beginning of the sport's reign. A standing room–only crowd of 36,000 showed up to see Grange begin his professional career on Thanksgiving Day at Cubs Park, and the receipts from the game were so enormous that, according to Crepeau, they caused team manager George Halas to openly weep.Read More: The Broadly Guide to Fantasy Football
The NFL and Television
(Today, of course, $8 million would be an insane bargain. Collectively, the NFL made $7.2 billion in TV revenue sharing last year, and that number will likely climb.)While initially the NFL needed television to survive, the relationship inverted over time. Now, according to Crepeau, the NFL gets to dictate what it wants, in terms of "money, time access, imagery, primetime availability, control over announcers, and advertising."Television programs once glorified the brutality of the game—specials like The Violent World of Sam Huff in the 1960s featured players crashing into each other set to classical music, "giving it a balletic sort of look," Crepeau said in an interview with Broadly—but as awareness of concussions grew, the packaging of the sport evolved to downplay the violence. Announcers changed the way they described plays. "The vocabularies of announcers changed: Instead of talking about violent hits, they talk about, 'Oh that was a hard hit.'"As football's popularity grew, so did ratings.
No Pain, No Traumatic Brain Injury
By 1952, a study had appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine urging players who had suffered three concussions to leave football forever for their own safety; that would be just the beginning of a concerted campaign by scientific and medical community to require the NFL to take better care of the safety of their employees.The NFL first acknowledged the threat that concussions posed to players in 1994, forming the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee to study brain trauma. The group was headed by Elliot Pellman, a rheumatologist who claimed to have studied at Stony Brook, but who actually attended medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico. He told Sports Illustrated, "Concussions are part of the profession, an occupational risk, like a steelworker who goes up 100 stories, or a soldier."The essence of the medical community's recommendations was the not-so-radical idea that players who had been knocked unconscious should be removed from a game. The NFL rejected the idea; one consultant told the press, "We see people all the time that get knocked out briefly and have no symptoms."Read More: Ronda Rousey Bragged About Beating the Shit Out of a Guy
A study in 2000 found otherwise. Of the 61 percent of players who had sustained concussions, "49% had numbness or tingling; 28% had neck or cervical spine arthritis; 31% had difficulty with memory; 16% were unable to dress themselves; and 11% were unable to feed themselves."Concussions are part of the profession, an occupational risk, like a steelworker who goes up 100 stories, or a soldier.
The NFL and Domestic Violence
Compared to other personal conduct violations, punishing players who abuse their wives or girlfriends has been much less of a priority, at least until recently. According to FiveThirtyEight, the average number of games a player was suspended for violating any personal conduction violations was three under the old policy; for the 15 cases of domestic violence that were punished under it, the average number of games suspended was half that, at just 1.5.And there have been many, many instances of players abusing their wives throughout the history of the NFL. Most famously and recently, Greg Hardy tossed his girlfriend against a wall, threw her on a futon strewn with guns, and choked her until she begged him to "kill me."In all, according to a USA Today NFL arrests database, 77 players across 27 of the League's 32 teams have been arrested since 2000 on charges of domestic violence. There are currently 44 active NFL players accused of sexual or physical assault.The NFL has lost its way. It doesn't have a Ray Rice problem; it has a violence against women problem.
The NFL and Women
Today, the NFL sponsors features like the "Savvy Girl's Guide to Football" in Marie Claire magazine and partners with brands like CoverGirl to encourage lady fans to catch the "fandemonium" by getting "fanicures."But as long as players are beating their wives and girlfriends, it'll likely take more than makeup to ensure women don't give up on the sport. In early September of last year, Terry O'Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, called for the NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, to resign in the hopes that his ousting could bring about systemic change in the way domestic abusers are punished within the league. "The NFL has lost its way," she wrote. "It doesn't have a Ray Rice problem; it has a violence against women problem."Between the halves, there is a 15-minute intermission during which the players leave the field. They go to their dressing rooms and rest. And you go into action: make a beeline for the refreshment stand, hunt for the ladies' room, chat with friends, check who's with whom, and who's wearing what, or simply enjoy the half-time show. This, of course, refers to your activity at the stadium. If you are at home watching a televised game, your half-time is usually spent on KP! Many a stew has been stirred, casserole checked, or dinner table set during these 15 minutes (see menus, page 10).
Six days later, Goodell announced the hiring of Lisa Friel (a NY-based lawyer who spent 28 years prosecuting sex crimes), Jane Randel (co-founder of the domestic violence prevention initiative "No More" in 2009), and Rita Smith (a longtime advocate with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence) to "help lead and shape the NFL's policies and programs relating to domestic violence and sexual assault." The League also promoted Anna Isaacson, formerly the NFL's VP of community relations and philanthropy, to the role of vice president of social responsibility. During the last Super Bowl, the NFL also ran a much-lauded anti-domestic violence advertisement.Nevertheless, it'll probably take a lot more than a few consultants and PR-friendly donations to "change the culture" at the NFL; when women speak out against abusers in the League, they fear pushback from hostile fans unwilling to admit that their on-field heroes could be off-field assholes (and from the League itself)—if they're willing to speak out at all. For now, considering the harm the League has done to both women and cerebrums, it continues to be amazing to many that anyone watches it at all—let alone one-third of all Americans.Make a beeline for the refreshment stand, hunt for the ladies' room, chat with friends, check who's with whom, and who's wearing what, or simply enjoy the half-time show.