Consider This from NPR - Scandals? What Scandals? The NFL Keeps Surging.

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

The NFL has dealt with plenty of scandal this century, but this offseason was pretty rough. Accusations of racist hiring practices, star players charged with sexual assault, and owners behaving badly have all been embarrassments for the league. None of that has affected the bottom line. TV ratings are as high as ever and NFL programs dominate the Nielsen top ten. Our host Juana Summers talks to Kevin Draper, sports reporter for the New York Times, about what, if anything, can slow down the NFL juggernaut. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. Sundays at the Hamilton Sports Bar and Grill are for the Baltimore Ravens. On this particular Sunday, every TV is showing the Ravens' home opener against the Miami Dolphins. This used to be a Mexican restaurant on a busy stretch of a commercial street

in northeast Baltimore. But Dante Harrison, one of the owners, had a different vision. I actually tried to create kind of an adult community center slash restaurant slash hangout place slash fun spot. We come in here for the games, but, you know, it's like community. We come and have fun, get a good meal, enjoy any sporting events.

The neighborhood around the bar is diverse, a mix of new and old families. Inside the restaurant is dimly lit with hand-painted murals of famous Maryland athletes. As the game gets going, the Ravens are scoring early and often. Bartenders are serving free Raven shots after every touchdown. And a group of people, including 60-year-old Dwight Claiborne, are playing poker while they watch the game. Claiborne has are playing poker while they watch the game. Claiborne has been a fan for as long as he can remember. I was seven years old liking the Pittsburgh Steelers from Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Green, Lambert, Swan, Stallworth.

I just loved the whole team, so I've been fascinated with football since. Fandom is often inherited. Earlier in the week, I caught a little bit of the Monday night football game at the Red Bear Brewing Company in Washington, D.C. Seattle transplant Katie Nisbet was watching her hometown Seahawks take on the Denver Broncos. And for her, football is family. My grandma is a big Seahawks fan. She wears Seahawks colors every Sunday. She's 93 years old. I talk to her almost like every Sunday after the game about the football game. So, you know, big tradition in our family.

But what happens when your family tradition starts to feel like a guilty pleasure? The NFL has pinballed from crisis to crisis over the years. Cases of domestic violence and sexual assault, concussions and CTE, accusations of racism, and team owners behaving badly. All of these things have made it hard for fans like Michelle Webster, who we also met at Red Bear. She was decked out in Seahawks gear, even down to her earrings. There's a lot as a feminist, like it's really hard for me to watch these men get slaps on the wrists for assault and other offenses against women. It's really disappointing, but at the same time, I've tried to give up the league and I've tried to not watch.

I don't know. I miss my team and I miss that aspect of my life. And so I do. I struggle with it a lot. Back at the Hamilton Sports Bar and Grill in Baltimore, Randy Bruton says he struggles too, especially when the league doesn't do right by all of its players. It's kind of tough, right, because being an African-American male and knowing how the NFL does African-American men. I asked him what he meant by that, and he said players and viewers have a choice. People normally, African-American men who are in the league,

normally come from deprived homes and try to do better for their family. So this is the way they do it. They know it comes at a cost. So it's just a choice. We have a choice. If you look at the TV viewing numbers, fans are choosing football. In the first week of September,

the top two shows in the Nielsen ratings were NFL games. Number three and number four in the ratings, NFL pregame shows. And honestly, when you hear Dante Harrison talk, that is no surprise. I asked him if there was anything that could make him turn off football for good. Never. I love the game. I grew up playing flag. No, I'm not flag. We play street football. We played in the street where the red car was the first down, the truck down the street was the first down, would never, ever, ever, ever. Nothing can change that.

Consider this. Year after year, the NFL is forced to confront scandals and controversies involving players, coaches, and team owners. Yet, the game is more popular than ever. We'll look at why, and if anything can slow down the NFL. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Friday, September 23rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the Wyze app today or visit wyze.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Even by NFL standards, this past offseason was a rough one as the league lurched from crisis to crisis. Let's tick through a couple. Back in February, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit accusing the league of racist hiring practices. In his filing, and in an interview with NPR's Jay Williams, Flores said the NFL is run like a plantation. Ownership's predominantly white. The workforce is 70% black. It's pretty easy to see how a modern-day form of that,

I think a reasonable person could see how that may be the case. Then there are the multiple ongoing investigations involving the Washington Commanders and team owner Dan Snyder. Congress is investigating how the team and the NFL handled allegations of sexual harassment of the team's female employees. Former marketing director Melanie Coburn testified before the House Oversight Committee back in February. I personally experienced harassment and misogyny during my 14 years with the organization, both as a cheerleader and marketing executive. Under Dan Snyder's leadership, women were used as sex objects and tools to increase sales rather than dignified human beings. Some of the NFL's biggest stars were also the focus of negative attention. Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson was suspended

for the first 11 games of the season and fined $5 million after more than 20 women accused him of sexual assault and misconduct during massage sessions. Watson told reporters he was innocent and issued an apology that left many scratching their heads. I'm going to continue to stand on my innocence and keep pushing forward. And I've always, you know, stood on not disrespecting or sexual assaulting anyone. What do you apologize for? For everyone that was affected about this situation. There was a lot of people that was triggered. But not the women that accused you of this?

I've apologized to all women. So anybody that was affected, even yourself. Any one of these scandals could paralyze a sports league. And to be sure, these scandals are not a good look for the NFL. But fans keep coming back, says New York Times reporter Kevin Draper. Well, we're only a couple weeks into the season, so we don't have great data from this season yet. But it looks to be just as high as it has been. And so TV viewership for the NFL is steady or growing at a time where on the rest of TV for scripted shows, you know, viewership is cratering. Draper wrote about the league's popularity despite its many scandals.

I asked him why fans are sticking with the NFL. I think the fact is football is an incredible sport to watch. There's a reason that millions of people, tens of millions of people do it each week, that they build their calendars, they build their Sundays around it, and they love the thing. And to get somebody to give up something they would love, I think takes a lot. And from what we've seen, kind of whatever scandals or problems the NFL might have, they aren't big enough to get substantial numbers of people to give that up. One thing that I found interesting, both as a fan and as someone who has followed the league

for a number of years and as a journalist, is the fact that the league has been making these overt plays to grow its support among women fans, trying to bring all of us into the fold more. But as you point out with some recent examples, and there's a lot of history here, the league does not always have a good record when it comes to dealing with domestic violence, sexual assault, and other mistreatment of women. Does that complicate their desire to grow the audience? Yeah, I think it definitely does. Over the last decade especially, the NFL has made sort of a much stronger push to attract female fans. The league sort of sees that the opportunities for growth with men are not nearly as big as the opportunities for growth with women.

And so it went from the traditional, we call it pinking and shrinking, of offering a pink jersey for sale, thinking that that's what NFL fans want, and instead kind of having a much more robust offering in treating women who are fans or potential fans as, you know, kind of real people and not just somebody who wants to buy something pink. I would think or I would hope that accusations of sexual assault or a league turning a blind eye to sexual misconduct would trouble all fans, whether men or women. I think it's undeniable that it does trouble women more and that it is a hurdle the league has to overcome to sort of show these women that something that is presumably a large concern of theirs is something that the league takes seriously. And you mentioned something else persistent in the league, too, the dearth of

Black coaches in a league where the majority of players are Black. The league has also struggled with how to handle social justice movements and the movement for racial justice in recent years. Have you had any opportunity to talk to fans about how they square those sorts of issues? I got to be honest here. I have not had too many conversations with fans how they square those. But I do think there's sort of maybe an overarching point to be made, which is that in this specific issue and a lot of other issues, the NFL is not so different from Congress, from other corporations, from maybe even other sports leagues, places where sexual misconduct isn't taken as seriously as it should, or where black people face, you know, worse opportunities or aren't given the opportunities that their white colleagues are. And so one of the things I think with changing your NFL fandom based upon these things is it sort of opens up questions of what else should you be changing and how as a fan do you navigate a world in which these biases persist in numerous venues, not just football. things are great for the nfl right now as you point out viewership remains high it is a sport that is a collective language for many fans who sit in front of their tv on sundays all day or at

a sports bar but as you point out in your piece, the future could be murky depending on how many fans stick around. High school football participation dropped by 10% between the years 2008 and 2018. And people, as I understand, like I did, often become fans when they are kids, whether they're watching football on TV or playing themselves. So I guess I'm curious, do you think we're seeing the start of a trend that could impact the league a decade or two from now? Yeah, I think it's undoubtable we're seeing a trend. The less known question is, where is it going to go or what is going to happen? If you talk to anybody involved in any sort of professional sports, they'll all tell you the key is to get people when they are young. And so the NFL sort of losing players, fewer high school players, more parents concerned about concussions,

I think it does a few things. One, it makes football players sort of a specific demographic. And so you see this with boxing, where boxing is a fairly dangerous sport. And while there certainly are boxers who come from middle class or upper class backgrounds, there aren't too many of them. And so you're starting to see us with football with upper class parents, parents who tend to live on the coasts. They tend to not let their kids play football at a higher rate than parents at other places. And so you both have an issue of fewer people playing

and so maybe fewer kids becoming lifelong fans, but it also sort of worsens the pool of players that high school football, college football, and eventually the NFL draws from. And it's hard to make predictions what the player pool will look like 20 years down the road, but it stands to reason that if more of America's best athletes are going to play other sports, the NFL will not be as popular if, you know,

it's populated by worse athletes. You think about the NFL now and all of the challenges and opportunities that you've reported on and that we've been discussing. How do you feel about it? Are you bullish about the league's future? Yeah, certainly in the medium term. In the long term, it's really hard to say. If we look back 50 years at the American sports landscape, it looked radically different than it does today. But there's just little evidence that in the near to medium term, much is going to change for the NFL. They've got these contracts that go for a decade in their media rights deals that guarantee them money. They're still filling up stadiums.

They're still filling up sports bars and couches. And so, you know, at least from a business and economic perspective, there's not much I see on the immediate horizon that will do much to dent the NFL's popularity. Reporter Kevin Draper of The New York Times. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.

Kauffman.org.