In one week, the 2022 NFL season will be over. It will be remembered for the Super Bowl triumph of the Kansas City Chiefs or Philadelphia Eagles, the final moments of Tom Brady’s playing career, and some spunky underdog campaigns from the Jacksonville Jaguars, New York Giants, Seattle Seahawks, and Detroit Lions. It will also go down as a year stained by scandal: When the NFL made national news, it usually meant something horrible had happened.
The defining story of the offseason was Deshaun Watson, the former Houston Texans quarterback who more than two dozen women have said sexually harassed, and in some cases assaulted, them during professional massage appointments. After a Houston grand jury declined to indict Watson, he signed the most lucrative fully guaranteed contract in league history with the Cleveland Browns, after a bidding war between multiple teams drove up his price.
This was hardly the only disgrace.
There was Dan Snyder’s Washington Commanders, an organization whose history of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, first revealed in a series of articles in the Washington Post in 2021, became the focus of congressional and NFL investigations. (Editor’s note: The author of this piece was interviewed by the Post in 2021 about sexual harassment she experienced while working as a beat writer covering the team.) Snyder, after spending part of his summer dodging a congressional subpoena on his yacht in the Mediterranean and presumably enjoying what is the world’s first seaborne IMAX theater, eventually agreed to testify and is now fielding multibillion-dollar offers to sell the team. Former Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s lawsuit over who leaked his racist, sexist, and antigay emails moved forward, though a Nevada judge last month issued a stay in the case, delaying the discovery phase. Dolphins owner Stephen Ross was fined and suspended, and his team was docked draft picks for tampering by trying to make a back-channel deal with Tom Brady and then–New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton in a failed attempt to lure the duo to Miami, news that had been revealed by former Miami coach Brian Flores as part of his class action lawsuit against the NFL claiming racist hiring practices. In November, a Washington Post report revealed that one of the white students pictured blocking six Black students from desegregating an Arkansas high school in 1957 was none other than a 14-year-old Jerry Jones, who would grow up to own the Dallas Cowboys and become one of the most powerful people in the American sports landscape.
On the field, some of the most serious questions facing the league about player health and safety were renewed—to a terrifying degree. Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered multiple concussions, one of which came when he played four days after displaying symptoms of a head injury. And in the season’s closing weeks, the entire NFL world waited in horror after 24-year-old Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field during Monday Night Football and was rushed to the hospital after receiving CPR near the 50-yard line.
In a year of football that has given us a presumed second MVP season from Patrick Mahomes; a record number of close games and game-winning drives; the 49ers making it to the NFC championship game with the last pick in the draft, Brock Purdy, at quarterback; and the greatest comeback in NFL history, those negative stories are the ones that, to me, have been inescapable. They are the ones that friends and family who don’t follow the NFL closely ask about and that reach NPR, cable news, and other non-sports media outlets. Yet within the sports world, it seems all too easy to just move on—to the next highlight segment or game and right into the pageantry of the Super Bowl. Hamlin lay without a heartbeat on a football field just over a month ago, and his story is no longer major news, unless it feeds a feel-good conclusion to what could have been the NFL’s worst nightmare.
I have wondered what to say to family and friends who ask what’s going on in this league, a multibillion-dollar business seemingly rife with moral failings, and how to feel about all of this, especially since evidence that these crises spur real change is scant. The reality is that amid all this, the NFL is enjoying record TV ratings and a sunny growth outlook; just last week, the league informed teams that next year’s salary cap will be a record-high $224.8 million—an increase of nearly $17 million from 2022. At their core, most of these unsavory events that plagued the NFL in the past year are about power—who the NFL shield really protects, and who it leaves to fend for themselves—and who, if anyone, has the power to force change. If this past year didn’t convince fans to turn off their televisions, throw away their jerseys, stop showing up to games, or at least question why the NFL remains king of the American sports world, will anything?
It’s not that the NFL’s misdeeds have flown below the radar. Especially when looking outside traditional sports media, it’s easy to find examples of these stories covered in a way that make the league and its power players seem almost comically villainous:
“NFL Owner Dodges Congressional Subpoena by Going on Vacation on His Yacht,” read a New York Magazine headline from July.
“’Tis the Season of Accused Abusers Returning to Pro Sports,” was the headline of a piece from Rolling Stone in December (though it’s worth noting that, of the three athletes discussed in that piece—Watson, former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, and NBA free agent Miles Bridges, only Watson is currently employed).
“There is already prime-time programming where people kill themselves for our entertainment. It’s called Monday Night Football,” went a punch line from a John Oliver segment on crime reporting from October. “Happy concussion season, football fans. It sure feels like this sport maybe shouldn’t exist!”
It would seem reasonable to assume that an institution plagued by these events and regarded in this way would be facing an existential crisis. But in reality, there’s a clear case to be made that the NFL has never been stronger.
In May, the league signed new media deals, which will be in place for the next decade, worth about $100 billion, nearly doubling the worth of the previous set of contracts. And less than two months ago, Google and the NFL struck a deal for YouTube TV to stream the league’s out-of-market games package, Sunday Ticket, at a reported price tag of $2.5 billion per year. The league had 82 of the top 100 television broadcasts in the U.S. last year, emerged from the pandemic with only growth on the horizon, and had record attendance and ticket demand at international games in 2022. It weathers its moral stress tests not so much with deft precision, but like the sandworm from Dune.
That enduring strength makes it easy to stare at the league’s dark underbelly and say that nothing matters and nothing will ever change, that owners will continue behaving badly, and profits will always be prioritized over player health. Nothing that happened in the NFL this season stopped any of the 53 million viewers who tuned into the AFC championship game from doing so, and if the way the NFL handles Watson and Snyder, or Tua and Damar, doesn’t carry real consequences, financial or otherwise, then asking the league to be better is an empty plea. Maybe making such a demand would still be the right thing to do, but it all starts to seem a bit pointless.
I struggle to accept that, though. Maybe that is in part because doing so would just be too upsetting, but also because I think the long-term future of anything is too variable to ever say “nothing” and “never.” These ugly events have clearly penetrated the public consciousness. There can be a degree of pressure that is too small to force a massive corporation like the NFL to fold but that’s still large enough to spur incremental positive progress. And there was a time in the history of every change when it hadn’t happened yet.
It would be a thrill to be able to say that a substantive change is on the horizon as a new generation of fans the NFL badly needs approaches adulthood. It would be lovely to think that Gen Z will hold the NFL to a higher standard than their parents or grandparents did and that the NFL will be forced to reckon with its shortcomings to win the attention, viewership, and consumer spending of current teens and young adults. But Gen Z, with its passion for social justice and apathy toward traditional media, seems like a challenging demographic for the NFL to bring into the fold.
Mike Lewis, a marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School whose research areas include Gen Z fandom, told me that the NFL’s cultural hegemony isn’t as strong among its youngest fans. He has found football fandom to be “plummeting” among younger generations, particularly Gen Z, which he defines as people born in or after 1997. The NFL is just one entity in a mix of sports and entertainment options and is no longer the “big dog” among its peers, Lewis said.
Last year’s edition of the Next Generation Fandom Survey, produced by Lewis and other researchers, found that 43 percent of respondents from Gen X identified as sports fans, slightly higher than millennials (at 41 percent) and significantly higher than Gen Z, at 33 percent. Meanwhile, 28 percent of Gen Z respondents identified themselves as “sports apathetic,” nine points above millennials and eight points more than Gen X. When Lewis broke down the responses by sport, he found football to have the highest fandom across generations, but with a dip for the youngest generation. Only 34 percent of Gen Z respondents identified as being a football fan—well below Gen X (44 percent), millennials (41 percent) and baby boomers (40 percent)—and they reported being fans of basketball, soccer, esports, and winter Olympic sports at a higher rate than the older generations.
“The brand is absolutely dominant, but there are cracks forming in the NFL brand,” Lewis said. “These cracks may form slowly—like, no one really noticed baseball deteriorating to being a niche sport, but it really did.”
This generational shift partly has to do with changes in how sports and media are consumed, including the rise of gaming as an entertainment and sports alternative, curated “For You” feeds on platforms like TikTok that favor individual interests over monoculture, and the simple fact that many kids and teens don’t watch much linear television. Mark Beal, a professor of communications at Rutgers who studies marketing to Gen Z, explained the dynamic to me through an exercise he does with his students every year in their first classes after the Super Bowl.
“I do a quick survey of how many students in the class actually watched the game broadcast,” Beal said. “And each year, it’s less and less and less. I’m just using round numbers, but if I had 100 students in class the day after the Super Bowl, approximately 10 will say, ‘I tuned in to the telecast.’”
Beal will also ask those students whether they saw content from the game, such as analyses or highlights on TikTok or the halftime show on YouTube. The response to that question is almost unanimously yes. In some ways, Gen Z’s strong pop-culture fandom correlates with an interest in the world of athletic stars, but the way they demonstrate that interest isn’t all that different from how they follow actors or musicians. It’s also not easy to monetize in the same ways the NFL has always monetized its fans as TV consumers, since it’s far more complex than using Nielsen data to sell ad space on network television.
Another part of what may make young fans hard to win over, though, has more to do with their tastes and values than it does with the technology and platforms they use. Broadly speaking, Gen Z is painted as a generation of junior activists: TikTok-fluent agents of social change. The sincerity with which you believe that picture to be true may vary depending on what image of Gen Z is currently conjured in your mind. Is it Malala or Greta Thunberg? A Harry Styles fan singing about kindness? Is it Sydney Sweeney in Season 1 of The White Lotus, behaving like a spoiled brat but still calling out the “unraveling of the social fabric”? But if Gen Z holds even a cosmetic focus on making the world a better place, it should follow that those values will influence their behaviors as consumers of media and entertainment products, sports included.
I should admit that wondering about this was my primary reason for calling these academic experts, probably hoping they’d confirm to me that the next generation is here to fix everything. And both Beal and Lewis did tell me that members of Gen Z care deeply about aligning themselves with organizations they see as having a positive impact on society. Beal, in fact, calls Gen Z the “purpose generation.”
“They want to see that an organization or a brand is purposeful in response to Black Lives Matter or purposeful when it comes to women’s rights or equality issues or the environment,” Beal said.
Beal said that when he asks students to give examples of brands they think behave with purpose, the typical answers are consumer brands like Patagonia or Ben & Jerry’s. The NFL hasn’t organically come up in those discussions; sports figured most prominently, he told me, when his students expressed interest in the societal issues raised by Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup this past fall.
According to Anna Isaacson, the league’s senior vice president of social responsibility, the NFL has appealed to this need for a sense of purpose and believes that fans are noticing. For evidence that its outreach to a younger demographic is working, the league points to ad and social media campaigns around Buccaneers linebacker Carl Nassib’s support for the Trevor Project and the league’s broader Inspire Change social justice initiative, which came out of the league’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
“Cause and social responsibility is important to our fans. They care about it, and young fans tend to care about it even more than others,” Isaacson told me.
It seems meaningful that there are people working in the NFL who have their antennae up for those particular trends. And while it’s reasonable to be skeptical about the real impact of a “consumer insights” report or social media campaign, young fans, especially, expect the brands they affiliate with to be responsive to their wishes. The key, perhaps, would be for the NFL to focus on what Lewis says is a central tenet of fandom: a sense of identity, belonging, and connection to a family or history, or even the vague sense of prestige that a particular team projects back onto its supporters. More recently, there’s another benefit to fandom Lewis has picked up on, which he’s termed “group power,” a subculture of fandom he describes in his research as individuals who “believe that it is important for their groups to identify and sanction bad behavior.”
When Lewis last year looked at what traits explain why someone wants to be a member of a group, millennials and Gen Z each scored at least 10 percentage points higher than baby boomers and Gen X in citing group power as what draws them to their identities as fans. Gen Z in particular is not only driven to wield group power, but is very good at doing so given how capable young people are at using the internet and social media to mobilize; we’ve seen this in the political arena, like when fans of the K-pop band BTS sabotaged ticketing to a Donald Trump rally. Lewis hypothesized that growing up in the age of global warming, in particular, has honed kids as activists. They operate in the manner of someone facing existential threats at all times.
“They’ve grown up with sustainability and climate change almost being taught as religions,” Lewis said. “And so now, as they come of age and they have these technology-based tools, well, if this is going to save the world, then you’ve got to get involved.”
It’s too soon to tell whether that willingness to mobilize for change will ever be directed at the NFL. Gen Z will grow up, and their brand of technological fluency may or may not become obsolete, just as their tolerance for the inevitable compromises of modern life may or may not change. It’s also possible that, for a generation deeply concerned about the future of the planet, the NFL is simply small potatoes. The old saying, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” offers a tempting paradigm, but unfortunately, that quote is either apocryphal or loosely attributable to Steve Bannon.
All we really know is that Gen Z should offer the best set of skills and ideas with which to force an entity like the NFL to change for the better and that, so far, that dynamic exists only in theory.
“I don’t think sports has faced that kind of fury from the younger generation,” Lewis said. “Yet, maybe.”
I hope the kids save us. I hope they make accountability cool and corporate responsibility profitable. Until they do, though, we’re still stuck untangling what it means for such an influential entity to allow people like Watson and Snyder to hold positions and power and for that league to seem as popular as ever.
The most optimistic answer may simply be that the NFL is changing in response to these events. It’s just changing slowly, so slowly it can feel like an affront to the dire circumstances that bring about the loudest calls for change. But massive, conservative corporations do not generally move quickly.
In our conversation, the NFL’s Anna Isaacson mentioned 2014 as another year when the league “had some similar challenges” and “really pivoted the way we think about social responsibility.” That was the year of Ray Rice, when the NFL strengthened its domestic violence policy to require a minimum of a six-game suspension for first-time offenders, though only after massive outcry over Rice’s initial two-game suspension.
Another example of a genuine, if slow, response to pressure to correct bad behavior in the NFL may be on the horizon if Snyder does sell the Commanders. While a potential $7 billion payday is a funny kind of consequence, it would mean something to have someone with his track record out of the league.
And over time, the league has amended its responses to the social movements and changes going on in our country.
I also spoke with Domonique Foxworth, an analyst for ESPN and a former NFL cornerback who served as president of the NFL Players Association. He brought up the NFL’s response to the murder of George Floyd as a flash point where something did change. Less than 24 hours after a group of prominent players, led by Patrick Mahomes, Tyrann Mathieu, and Michael Thomas, demanded recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement from the NFL and an apology for silencing peaceful protests in the past, commissioner Roger Goodell issued a videotaped apology and said, “We, the NFL, admit we were wrong.”
What Foxworth noted about that response from Goodell was the tacit admission from the highest perch of the NFL that you can’t draw a line between sports and politics or society. That separation has always been a fallacy, but you don’t have to look any further back than Colin Kaepernick to see it routinely cited as reason enough to squash some activism.
“It gives me some optimism,” Foxworth said. “Because I do think that it has changed the idea that ‘Keep your whatever out of my sports’ is a thing that kids growing up today or even adults today can expect going forward.”
I don’t mean this to indicate that it’s all OK because of some slight potential shift in the Overton window for the majority of NFL fans, and that wasn’t Foxworth’s point either. For every new domestic violence or sexual assault policy, sponsored PSA, or charitable donation, there seems to be a situation like Watson’s that undermines the league’s credibility on an issue it claims to support. The NFL did strengthen its policy on domestic violence after Ray Rice, but former judge Sue L. Robinson, the independent arbiter assigned to the Watson case, cited a lack of consistent application of that six-game baseline in prior player disciplinary decisions in the post-Rice era among her reasons for recommending only a six-game suspension for Watson last summer, which was extended to 11 games when the NFL appealed and the league and players association reached a settlement. “The NFL may be a ‘forward-facing organization,’ but it is not necessarily a forward-looking one,” Robinson wrote in her ruling.
This is a league that continues to grapple with diversity and equity. The NFL went into the 2022 season with only six coaches of color and only two non-white owners, and former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores laid bare the league’s history of discriminatory hiring practices in the class action lawsuit he filed just before last year’s Super Bowl. The current coaching cycle has seen one team hire a Black coach—the Houston Texans with DeMeco Ryans, though Ryans replaces Lovie Smith, who last month was the second Black coach fired by Houston after just one season.
And it has not even been a full year since the NFL stemmed the practice of “race-norming” in the dementia testing it uses to allocate the resources of its concussion settlement, which had previously assumed lower baseline cognitive functioning in Black former players—nor did it suddenly solve its long-standing issues with racial inequality because it spray-painted “END RACISM” onto the back of some end zones.
Still, many of the NFL’s attempts to prove its commitment to diversity and social justice feel like words instead of actions. Evidence that the last few years have really changed public perception of the intersection of sports and politics is also mixed, though it does exist. Scott Brooks, research director at the Global Sport Institute at Arizona State University, told me that his consumer polling shows that people give conflicting answers about whether they want to see politics in sports (some will say they don’t but also will say athletes should use their platforms to express themselves) but that he has seen a “loosening” of the general public’s desire to separate the two.
That might not feel like a lot. It might not be a lot. But it is unusual, given the extreme polarization of our political and social landscapes, for there to be any broad-based conversation at all that doesn’t end in a total retreat into the groups’ respective corners. And the general viewpoint of the NFL, with its historic ties to military proselytism and mostly white, wealthy, male leadership, skews conservative politically. This is an NFL that didn’t have room for Kaepernick but holds up a figure like Tony Dungy, who last month tweeted a debunked and harmful conspiracy theory about transgender and nonbinary children, invoked Damar Hamlin’s near-death experience in a speech at an anti-abortion-rights rally, and then took part in a regular NBC game broadcast all in the span of a few days. But it’s also an NFL where the majority of players are Black, and the teams and most of the media covering those teams are located in urban areas, which skew liberal.
“The only way that things change is collective action, and how do you speak to the people you require for a collective action? You can write an op-ed in The New York Times that us nerdy Northeasterners are going to read and pass around and get all excited about, and then no one else hears about it and cares about it,” Foxworth said. “I’m sure in [the height of the playoffs], we’re not going to talk about it anymore. But during this particular window, we pushed society a centimeter in the right direction, and then more shit will happen, and we’ll continue to do it, and now it’s acceptable, and it’s acceptable in part because of those stupid signs in the back of the end zone.”
At the very least, that is something different from “Nothing matters, and nothing will ever change.”
“As terrible as this year in football has been, what helps me get through is just that it’s an opportunity,” Foxworth said. “It’s like, you know what? I can talk about all the shit that matters in the world to me, and it’s not even just talking about it generally. It’s talking about it to people who don’t seek it out and wouldn’t normally listen to it.”
This has not been a year of political courage in popular culture writ large. The righteous energy of 2020 has faded, beaten back by a national debate over “cancel culture” that has mostly served to sanction public hatred. The concept of “sportswashing” entered many people’s vernacular for the first time, but China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have each enjoyed the respective spotlights of the Olympics, World Cup, and LIV Golf without real resistance. WNBA star Brittney Griner, an American professional athlete at the apex of her sport, was detained in Russia for nearly the entire year with shockingly little outcry from back home. The de facto state of the sports world has been to go along to get along, and I suppose that a year of bad NFL news fits fairly well in this time line.
So, as the curtain rises on the annual Super Bowl spectacle, my explanation of the NFL’s year in 2022 includes the recognition that the sport often came with disappointment and regular reminders that, for all its PSAs, programs, and charitable donations, the league’s commitment to supporting women, advancing social justice, and valuing player safety extends only to the point of holding its own accountable for their actions—as long as it doesn’t interrupt the league’s cash flow. It also includes the understanding that there is little indication that the NFL has faced any genuine consequence for this. In the coming days, the league will crown a champion and award the best performances in playing, coaching, and roster-building as a way to celebrate and memorialize the season, and I think for many, that celebration will be interwoven with an acknowledgement of the NFL’s moral failings throughout the year. That’s an uncomfortable feeling because it couples a thing that brings excitement and joy with disenchantment and hypocrisy. It’s worth sitting in that discomfort, though, mostly because it’s honest, and just maybe because acknowledging it could make some tiny difference.
