The numbers are staggering: an estimated $500-600 million of revenue pouring into the area between ticket sales, tourism, special promotions like “Super Bowl Boulevard” near Times Square, sold-out hotel rooms and restaurants, and on and on.
Then there’s the ever-escalating cost of TV advertising for the big game, now reportedly up to near $4 million for a 30-second spot during Fox’s coverage of the single-largest TV audience of the year world-wide. (And, thanks to YouTube and other social media outlets, many of the ads have already been previewed by millions of spectators, spoiling the once-anticipated surprise element of the ads.)
In a still-stuggling economy nationwide and extended unemployment benefits scheduled to end for millions of unemployed Americans just after this past Christmas, an article on New Jersey's official website in December bragged of the thousands of temporary jobs (albeit VERY short-term) that the Super Bowl would generate for the state.
That’s all well and good, but pro football has been savaged in recent years by increasing attention to the long-term effects of concussions and physical punishment inflicted on its gladiators every Sunday. A class-action settlement against the National Football League approaching an eye-popping $700 million to compensate former players for their injuries and disabilities was rejected by a federal judge, who felt the offer didn’t come close to being adequate given the skyrocketing number of retired players diagnosed with early-onset dementia and other crippling ailments.
The longevity of star quarterbacks like Denver’s Peyton Manning (completing his 15th season in the NFL) notwithstanding, some sources peg the average career-span for most league players as closer to three years.
Amid a cautionary message by President Obama that, if he had son, he’d have to think twice about letting him play tackle football, recent statistics show that fewer high school students are getting involved in not only football, but other heretofore popular team sports like baseball, soccer and basketball – all of which have become outsize moneymakers with mega-million-dollar star salaries.
Granted, there may be other reasons that America’s youth are shying away from team sports. Those include the well-documented obsession with the Internet, video games and social media, not to mention a decrease in physical activity and an alarming spike in the number of obese children in recent years. However, this doesn’t bode well for football’s future, both arguably as the nation’s most popular sport (having surpassed baseball some years ago) and as a lucrative employer.
Football’s proponents point to the fact that the game has evolved since its inception in the late-19th century more than once. President Teddy Roosevelt famously advocated for reforming the game and divorcing it from its even more violent forebear, rugby, in the wake of not just serious injuries but numerous deaths on the field.
Roosevelt’s initiatives led to the introduction of the forward pass, which did make the game more civilized and added to its mushrooming popularity in the latter 20th century. Advances in protective equipment and helmets would seem to herald making the game safer, but by many accounts, it seems to be getting less so.
In what could be seen as an oxymoron, Paul Allen, the owner of this year’s Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, has founded and contributed millions of dollars to the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men contends that the hundreds of scientists employed by the institute research brain injuries not just to pro footballers but to thousands of returning war veterans who suffer their own myriad of brain impairments.
So what of the future of America’s favorite spectator sport? In a long expose published recently about pro football and the concussion problem in The New Yorker, Dave Meggyesy has a lot to say. The onetime linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s who first sounded the alarm about the NFL in his memoir, “Our of Their League” decades ago, gave this prediction: “I don’t think it’ll be driven by public opinion, but by lawyers and insurance companies.”
Stay tuned.