The summer edition of the Culture Study Cookbook Club is here!! We’re cooking from Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish and it’s going to be SO GOOD. If you want to sign up to cook a recipe, I’ve put together a Google Spreadsheet here — just put some version of your name in there to claim it. On July 20th, we’ll come together and talk about what we cooked, how it went, and vote on our Fall cookbook pick. [Indian-ish is widely available (try your local library!) but if you don’t have access, email me and we’ll figure something out.]
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It’s a total coincidence that this week’s episode of the The Culture Study Podcast pairs quite well with today’s piece — it’s all about unpacking current intensive parenting trends (in a way that doesn’t try to make parents feel shitty). The co-host is the great Melinda Moyer, and we talk about how “gentle parenting” has diluted and infused so much of parenting culture, how to handle generational parenting divides, and so much more. Click this magic link to listen wherever you get your podcasts — or go listen over at the show page.
Last month I was in Seattle for a weekend visit, staying with some college friends who have a third grader and a kindergartner. After our usual Sunday morning routine of some film in the larger Hotel Transylvania universe, we set off to a morning of flag football.
I love these kids and love hanging out with their parents on the sidelines, but I don’t generally love watching kids’ sports. Soccer is just a boring blob and somehow it’s always raining. Baseball is an endless stream of bad pitches. But I was pleasantly surprised by just how fun it was to watch these shorties play football. The kindergartners didn’t really have plays, but they understood the concept (which, if you think about it, is kinda just complicated tag?) and at this point in the season, were getting pretty good at handing off the ball and dodging defense.
But the third graders!! They had plays — lots of them. Fakes. Lots of passing and beautiful catches. Half the team plays offense for the first half and the other half plays defense, then they switch. The game moves quickly and there’s a lot of scoring but because you can’t “run it back” (aka, intercept the ball and then run to score) it’s hard to drive up the score in a way that feels crappy. The sun was out, the kids were drinking Capri Suns, and there wasn’t an angry sideline dad in sight.
And then, of course, I started asking questions. How do they get away with using the NFL team names and logos on the jerseys? Why is this so well organized? The parking lot was overflowing with Rivians, Audis, and apologetic Teslas. How did these parents — who’d likely never consider letting their kid play tackle football — get here?
Luckily my best friend is also a person who likes to ask questions and sideline analyze cultural phenomena so she broke it down for me between plays:
There are many different leagues across the US, but this particular league is officially called NFL FLAG, and the Washington teams are specifically affiliated with the Seahawks. (Philadelphia teams are affiliated with the Eagles, New York teams are affiliated with the Giants, etc. etc.) But only the league champions get to wear the jersey of their ‘home’ NFL team; all the other teams are other teams in the league (my friends’ kids both played on the Chiefs, for example).
There are currently 2000+ leagues across the United States, and they just launched a rapidly expanding program in Canada (with a goal of 250 leagues in the next three years). Participation in kids sports has been falling across the board for the last decade — but flag football is exploding. Since 2015, the number of 6 to 12 year-olds playing has grown by 38%. There are lots of non-NFL leagues, but the NFL one is the biggest (and is generally very well organized).
The leagues are co-ed or, in a few cases, girls-only. You can play from age 4 to 17.
The NFL doesn’t really care if you play in its flag league — they just want you to play in a league (if you search for leagues using its local league finder, it pulls up all sorts of YMCA and Boys & Girls Club options). They’re also lobbying heavily for wide scale adoption of girls’ flag football in high schools across the United States (right now, it’s sanctioned in 15 states and being piloted in an additional 18). They just really want kids to play football.
In Seattle, the league is explicitly positioned as a low-buy-in sport: you show up for two hours on Saturday or Sunday, and that’s the extent of the commitment for the week. The team practices for around 45 minutes before the game, and then the game itself lasts less than an hour.
When I was at the game, I ran into another one of my college classmates, there to watch his son. After I posted a pic of the game on Instagram, another friend told me she’d been across the field complex, watching her twin girls, who are avid players. And as I tried to back my car out of the packed parking area without dinging the pristine $70,000 SUV next to me, I thought: huh, the NFL is really pulling something off here.
We have to backtrack a bit to make sense of it. In 2015, the NFL reached its all-time peak broadcast audience numbers, reaching an average of 18.1 million viewers per week. But then those numbers began to decline: in 2017, average weekly ratings were down to 14.9 million viewers, and hung out in the 14-15 million range through 2020.
At that point, the effects of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), an increasingly diagnosed brain degeneration in players who’d received repeated concussions, had been public for years. I don’t think you can attribute the decline in viewership to Aaron Hernandez’s 2017 autopsy results (which revealed signs of CTE in the brain) or the release of Will Smith’s (pretty melodramatic) movie Concussion, based on Dr. Bennet Omalu’s attempt to identify CTE and convince the NFL what was happening to its players.
I don’t think people necessarily stopped watching football because of CTE. I just think their relationship to football got more complicated. During this same period, high school football participation continued what was by then a decade-long decline. If, knowing what you know, you wouldn’t let your own kid play football — what does it feel like to watch other people’s kids play football? Is the natural evolution of the sport just a scenario where poor kids agree to risk brain degeneration in order to lift their family out of poverty? That’s some Gladiator shit.
We know now that tackle football participation numbers have dropped in every state save Alabama and Mississippi. We also know that high schoolers in states that voted for Trump in 2020 are 1.5 times more likely to play football (not surprising, for several reasons) — and, according to recent Washington Post polling, liberal voters are more likely to discourage their kids from playing football, whereas the conservatives’ thinking on the subject has not changed since 2012.
As Andrew M. Lindner, a sociologist who studies football participation, put it to the Post, “There seems to be a very disturbing possibility that who your dad voted for [in the presidential election] could influence your risk for very serious [football-related] ailment or injury.”
The NFL recognized that it had a massive problem. Yes, they were dealing with thousands of its former athletes experiencing significant and often profoundly dangerous brain degeneration. But they were also at risk of breaking their fan pipeline, which took football-playing kids and gradually transformed them into football-obsessed NFL fans who spanned the political spectrum. Liberal, bougie parents might not make up the majority of their audience, or even a third. But disinvestment in the sport, even just gradually, would have ramifications that would be impossible to reverse.
Or rather: impossible to reverse unless they stopped tackling. Which is not going to happen — at least not until we get rid of the electoral college and the filibuster and recede from our current state of extreme ideological polarization, wherein banning even extremely dangerous types of tackles is understood as infringing on others’ freedom (to watch other people tackle).
People with this sort of ideological positioning put banning tackle in the same bucket as allowing books about trans people in schools, gun registration laws, DEI initiatives, vaccine mandates, environmental regulations, and restrictions against four-wheelers in wilderness areas. No one should have the right to regulate someone else’s kids, the thinking goes, or your way of having fun. To mess with football is to mess with both — and a crucial component of the American masculine ideal.
Obviously there are all manner of contradictions inherent to this line of thinking (I should have the freedom to go to a concert and not be scared of getting shot, just to start) but it helps illuminate why any attempt to regulate football, whether on the part of the league or the part of the state, is understood as a form of moral injury. In these circles, it wouldn’t be received as “protecting kids” or “saving lives” — it would be the libs saying that I guess it’s illegal now for men to be men (etc. etc. etc.)
So banning tackle is off the table. How, then, does the NFL get people to stop thinking about its effects? The short-term play: distraction. I don’t think Taylor Swift was a plant, but I do think the league appreciated her presence tremendously. The long-term play: get people who’d internalized the CTE dangers invested in football without tackling, while also promoting the idea of the NFL as beneficent and forward-thinking (instead of terrified of its reactionary base).
Enter: a sprawling, well-organized, well-publicized, inclusive flag football apparatus that integrates a form of football into millions of family’s lives. (The NFL first started investing in flag back in the early 2000s, but has ramped up those efforts considerably over the last ten years). Of course, many of these flag football-playing families were already watching the NFL, and likely would have even without their kid getting into flag. But flag makes the NFL look like it’s really working on the problem. Like it cares about kids, and gender-inclusion, and believes that “the future of football is female.”
If an organization that was not the NFL was doing this work, my reaction would be: this rules. And I want to be very clear about this: flag football does rule. When I talked to Frankie de la Cretaz, co-author of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, earlier this week, they emphasized that these co-ed leagues are particularly awesome for non-binary and trans kids who don’t have to negotiate other people’s hang-ups about who should play. Plus, a sport that hasn’t (yet) been super professionalized that kids don’t have to start playing at age five if they want to keep playing: amazing. More fun, lower-commitment sports for all!
But you cannot separate the NFL’s flag boosterism from the rest of its politics. The league has made numerous efforts to reduce the amount of concussions in games (changing kickoff rules, testing and requiring better helmets, and changing rules about helmet to helmet tackles and how teams enact concussion protocols with players who have taken hard hits). But the sport is still in an untenable position: the reforms necessary to make the sport truly safe from traumatic head injury (banning or drastically changing tackling) would result in a game that is not, strictly speaking, football.
That doesn’t mean they couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. Kids who want to make it to the NFL start taking hits as tweens. That, too, should be seen as untenable. Right now, the NFL is building a gorgeous new pipeline to its stadium seats — while also keeping a different, collapsing pipeline open, luring kids there with the promise of millions of dollars on the other side, and assurances that they take player safety very seriously.
Just look at the FAQ section of the NFL Flag website, under the question “Is football safe to play?”:
Football, as we know it, is changing. The way the game used to be taught and played is different from what’s happening today. Player protection and injury prevention are front and center, causing a major culture shift within the sport. Leagues across all levels are adopting new technology, regimes and regulations in an effort to reduce the risk of injury, as researchers continue to focus on the impact of sustained contact in youth sports.
The phrase “culture shift” is doing so much work here. Football is changing! This is not the bad headlines, wife-abusing, double-homicide football! In other words, don’t look here —
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Look here:
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The photo-op visits from NFL players, the Future of Football is Female kiosks at football stadiums, the promotion of college-level flag scholarships for women — all of it works to smooth the ick factor. It persistently and persuasively invites bougie parents to understand “football culture” as something that includes families with politics and beliefs and zip codes like theirs.
There’s a term for using sports to soften a cultural perception of something in need of an image overhaul: sportswashing. In recent years, Russia and a number of the Gulf states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia have invested in popular sports teams, leagues, and championships to take some of the focus away from their human rights abuses, unabashed corruption or regressive policies toward women and minority ethnic groups.
Most recently, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars building LIV Golf, a mostly-sham organization that has nevertheless recruited popular golfers with tantalizing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Each year, the golfers play a tournament in Saudi Arabia — and while they’re not full on propagandists for the state, the investment and participation from popular athletes is meant to make the country look more modern, friendly, and paper over atrocities like, say, the killing of the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi.
What the NFL is doing with flag football is obviously not the same. But it’s not wildly different either. In a weird way, the NFL is sportswashing itself with a different sport in order to make the original sport appear a little less regressive.
And when you’re convinced of the NFL’s good intentions, it’s much easier to let your own slip around — particularly when your kid is having fun. I talked to one dad in Central Washington who was adamant he’d never let his son play tackle. But his son fell in love with flag, and excelled at it immediately. Because of where they live, many of his peers will be moving on to tackle. This dad felt his hard line slipping: what if he just plays offense? But the only way to protect your kid from the dangers of tackle football is to not let them play tackle football.
Of course, you could read all of this differently: the flag league is the NFL’s attempt to very gradually groom its audience into getting on board with the eventual shift, several decades in the future, to a flag league. But no one really thinks that’s going to happen. Instead, flag will continue to grow in popularity: it’s officially now part of the 2020 Summer Olympics, and the NFL has cleared its players to participate. The NFL isn’t trying to replace the tackle league. They’re trying to create a second income stream while bolstering the first.
I don’t think kids should stop playing flag — and I certainly won’t stop watching my friends’ kids play it. But I also hope we can see the NFL’s facilitation for what it is: sportswashing its own sport.
You can love flag football and still find the NFL fundamentally despicable. You can pinpoint its joys, and why it feels safe for your kids, and continue to ask questions about why we allow any kids to play a profoundly more dangerous iteration. I hope you’ll join me. ●
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For more thinking on the paternalistic way the NFL is treating women’s football, see Frankie de la Cretaz’s piece on gender equality in football — and subscribe to their newsletter for ongoing smart commentary on queer sports and pop culture. I also recommend the six-part Washington Post series on “the divided states of football” and Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva’s The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game,
This is so thoughtful, and articulates a shift I've been watching and kind of sensing, but hadn't thought deeply about. Thank you! It's interesting to think about the reforms to football in the early 20th century too... from about 1905-1915 there were over 10 deaths of college players per season! And yet reforms were considered "mollycoddling," the influence of "feminization," etc... so interesting how the flag football advocacy does an end run (ha) around some of those critiques even though they are still very much with our culture.
I watched our 10yo nephew play two flag football games over the past two weekends--our first direct experiences with NFL Flag.
Our games weren't much fun--I'd rather watch tween soccer myself, but I am a soccer fan, generally--but I was struck by the distinct MALENESS of it all. Even with the two girls on our nephew's team, the whole experience was kind of...off. The coaches were hyper-invested dads, the refs and coaches were argumentative ("Do you want me to show you the rule book?!?" was shouted at one point), and the whole experience had a tint of "bigger, faster, stronger, meaner" to it.
Maybe the specifics of any given league really matter here.
Maybe my own reaction to seeing all of the NFL branding put me on edge from the jump.
But I was happy when our nephew seemed far more invested in a bottle tossing contest with his teammate while sitting on the sideline than anything happening on the field.
I grew up playing all the sports as a kid, and they shaped me in really important ways. (I even had a spat with our principal in 8th grade because I wanted to play flag football with the boys rather than volleyball with the girls--I had grown up being my older brother's throwing partner in the street, and I would have been, hands-down, the best quarterback in my grade. But I wasn't allowed--because football was for boys. Welcome to the early '90s. Harumph.)
It feels like kids sports are so toxic now, though. They are places where privilege and access rule, and they are spaces where parental worries about their kids' futures seem to take precedence over everything else.
I might need a whole discussion thread devoted to unpacking youth sports. The good, the bad, the ugly, the hopeful--in the past and the present.