Photography courtesy of Clstds, Wikimedia Commons
After Christmas presents are exchanged and New Year’s Eve marks the last day of the year, the National Football League playoffs begin the following weekend. That's followed by the Super Bowl, which, historically, marks the end of the NFL season.
Well, that was true when Vince Lombardi paced the sidelines of Lambeau Field and Dandy Don Meredith was in the booth of Monday Night Football, crooning “The Party’s Over” by Willie Nelson as the clock wound down.
Nowadays, the NFL season doesn’t stop. The party never ends, and the road goes on forever. Tune into any local or nationals sports-talk show in February, April, June—pick a month—and you’ll hear sports talking heads blathering on about the NFL draft, free agency, trades, injuries, salary caps, pre-season prognostications, and wistful analyses of games and seasons past.
“It’s the NFL’s world, and we’re just living in it,” says Frank Cusumano, longtime KSDK sportscaster and host of radio sports talk show The Press Box, from 10 a.m. to noon weekdays on WGNU (920 AM). Cusumano cites surveys that show the top television ratings for sporting events are dominated by the NFL. Depending on how the rankings are defined, the NFL often has all of the top 10 sports events. In some rankings, another sport—often basketball or baseball—isn’t ranked until the mid-teens.
“As a sports talk show host, you have to play the hits,” says Cusumano, who is unapologetic about football’s dominance in sports talk radio. “I could not sit down and watch the Milwaukee Brewers play the Seattle Mariners, but I am fascinated when the Green Bay Packers play the Seattle Seahawks. The NFL has it all. It satisfies man’s basic needs—violence, suspense, skill, and coaching. I’m guilty. I’m in, hook, line, and sinker.”
For its overall dominance, football’s paucity of action allows for frequent breaks. The sport is built for television. A three-hour broadcast of a game, as the Wall Street Journal famously has reported, has 11 minutes of action. During that broadcast, there are more than 100 commercials. Football also is popular for betting, with point spreads and weekly games that have reams of statistics and injury reports providing ample evidence for almost any betting decision.
Football’s popularity feeds its popularity. For many of those tuning into the radio for sports chatter, their appetite is controlled by the available diet. Not much else breaks through the local talk sports scene but the NFL. Hosts are briefed with audience surveys and ratings to show that the NFL is—and should be—Topic A. Cardinals baseball is the only thing that competes, and that is mainly during the baseball season.
“St. Louis is one of the few towns—or the only town in the U.S.—where baseball can sometimes trump football. That’s mainly because the baseball has been so good and the football has been so bad,” says Cusumano. “But on a Rams Monday, especially after a loss on Sunday, the phones are lit up. Everybody thinks they can coach a football team.”
One storm cloud that hovers on the horizon is football’s recent link to injuries, particularly head injuries, but also including joint and back injuries. Cusumano says he's done numerous pieces about head injuries and concussions in football, but he doubts the concerns about risks to players will affect sports ratings.
“I do think there is going to be a drop off in participation on football teams. There will be fewer people on the younger levels playing football,” Cusumano says. “But in terms of football’s ‘watchability,’ its popularity—in my mind, they are talking about players in their 60s having memory issues—that is not going to affect viewers. There is no way people will turn away from watching the game.”
Dr. Alan Blum, director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, agrees that negative reports about football injuries won’t affect the sport's media dominance. News about impaired former players or premature deaths due to football-related conditions won’t change spectators’ viewing habits, he believes.
“The titration point will only be crossed when watching football will give you a concussion," Blum says. "Other than that, there’s no other way—it’s our national religion. You have so many converts. Women are watching it. The black-outs are gone, so even if the stands are half-filled, everybody is sitting at home, watching it, getting fatter. You tell me: How is this formula ever going to be broken?”
Blum doesn’t buy the analogy that football is the “tobacco of sports,” that the public will turn away as more health risks become known. “It’s not a good analogy,” he says. “All of the changes that were done by the tobacco industry were meaningless; filters on cigarettes actually were more harmful. I don’t think anyone is saying newer helmets are more harmful or wrong. You could argue newer, scientifically designed helmets give a false sense of confidence.”
Recent changes in football were designed to emphasize safety. Changing the yard line of the kickoff to decrease returns, penalizing and fining players for helmet-to-helmet contact, and issuing rules about when players with concussions can return to play are all designed to limit injuries and long-time health problems.
In Sunday’s Rams game, Dashon Goldson of Tampa Bay was flagged for a personal foul for helmet-to-helmet contact on a tackle. By some media accounts, Goldson already has been fined more than $100,000 this season for illegal hits. Clearly, the NFL is aware of its image problem.
At the University of Alabama School of Medicine, Blum sees an increasing number of medical students and residents choosing sports medicine as a subspecialty. “A good portion of my family-practice residents—maybe a quarter of them—are picking sports medicine,” says Blum. “An injury that 10 years ago might mean you’d have to quit playing, now they can get them back out playing again.”
Increasingly, those therapies and surgeries are not just for professional or college athletes, but also for high school- and even grade school- aged athletes, Blum says. He emphasizes that good athletic trainers at any level are vital for the prevention of injuries.
Yet as new reports and studies show the long-term effects of football injuries, doubts arise. Several years ago, broadcaster Terry Bradshaw predicted that football’s popularity would decline due to the toll it takes on players. Kurt Warner said he wouldn’t let his son play football, though he later backed off that statement.
Blum likens football now to boxing in the 1960s. “Do you ban boxing? No, you make it better,” Blum says. “You limit the number of rounds, get better head gear.”
With all of the media promotion of sports and widespread youth involvement, Blum believes changing the rules is the way to go. He points to two extreme examples. Current University of Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron has “had virtually no injuries in four years," notes Blum, who attends Alabama’s home football games. "How do you explain that?” He then points to Tyrone Prothro, an Alabama receiver who broke his leg while catching a touchdown pass against Florida in 2005. “I saw his leg break in half—a broken tibia. I was there. It was the definition of absolute silence in the stadium.” Prothro never played again.
“Every single rule change has been for safety reasons. You could argue it’s all window dressing,” Blum says. “I’m not saying if they do all these things football will be safer or better or reduce injuries. But that’s my intuitive sense, that it would be.”
