There are a few things Progressives might want to ponder before they clear their Sunday afternoon for "the game", the first of which is that watching the Super Bowl supports one of the most destructive corporations in America, the NFL. In fact, watching football in general is bad for your health and terrible for the nation. Go to a human rights demonstration instead.
While we are obsessing over the amount of air in footballs and how to clear everything from Sunday’s schedule so we can kick back on the couch and watch the “The Game”, there are a couple of things Progressives might want to ponder, first of which is that watching the Super Bowl supports one of the most destructive corporations in America, the NFL.
The NFL holds out false promises to tens of thousands of young men, mostly minorities, damages the ones it actually fulfills those promises to, upends and corrupts the finances of hundreds of colleges and universities around the nation, supports a vast industry of betting that fleeces mostly poor people, and, along with its partner, ESPN, siphons tens of millions of dollars a month from our cable bills, extorts hundreds of millions of dollars from poor and middle class taxpayers to give to billionaires and invades our living rooms and Sundays to fill them with commercialized violence, watery beer and heart-clogging, taxpayer-subsidized food.
“Oh no”, you say, “not football – how can you criticize football, especially when I am so looking forward to the seeing the Patriots/Seahawks lose/win”. Easy, just look beyond the hoopla, betting pools, cheerleaders' tushes and half-time mashups and consider the facts.
1. Football is not a sport; it is a business. Although the NFL is registered as a non-profit corporation, in reality, it is not; it exists for the financial benefit of its executives, team owners and TV networks like ESPN, Fox Sports, etc. It is not about the game; it is all about pure, unbridled capitalist greed. One only has to look at the compensation at the top to understand this.
Annual revenue for the NFL in 2013 was over $9 billion, as much as Hollywood made. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said he is determined to expand the NFL’s reach to earn $25 billion by 2027. That is a CEO talking, not a sports enthusiast. And why not? He was paid $44.2 million last year. Think about it; the guy who runs a company whose only product is televised commercial violence makes over 4 times the median salary of a US corporate executive and twice the salary of the CEO of Walmart. More shameful is the fact that while he is taking home enough money to buy a small island every year, the average wage of a football stadium groundskeeper is $11.13/hr or $23,150 a year, which is to say that Goodell earns 1900 times as much as the lowest paid NFL satadium worker Even Walmart would blush at that.
And like any business, the NFL uses its money to dilute Democracy by paying off Members of Congress, and it leans slightly Republican. The Gridiron PAC gave out $547,000 in the last cycle, and NFL executives donate more to the NFL PAC, which pays off both parties pretty equally.
2. The NFL holds out unfulfilled promises to tens of thousands of young men every year. According to the Georgia Career Information Center, which tracks students from colleges like Georgia Tech, where I taught, found that .09% of high school football players in the US make it to the pros, and only 2% of those that play football in college make it to the pros, but 59% of high school football players think they will get a college football scholarship and make it to the pros (the numbers are even more stark for NBA). These are big numbers in absolute terms: 17, 767 high schools fielded football teams in the US in 2011, engaging 1.1 million young men. Almost 650,000 of them dreamed of going to the NFL, but there are fewer than 2000 slots in any given year, many of which are already filled by existing players. But the NFL makes money on the hoopla surrounding the “draft picks” , which is based on a scarcity of product and an overwhelming demand…and disappointing over 640,000 kids.
Those dashed dreams of making it into the NFL damage academics and cost taxpayer money. The Atlantic found that American eight graders spend twice as much time in sports and half as much time in academics and South Koreans who beat them hands down in math and science. And the taxpayers pay for it: Atlantic found that schools in the US routinely spend more tax dollars on athletics, especially football, than on academics. All this so .09% of high school players can get into the NFL where they can generate $10 billion in revenue and pay $44.2 million to Roger Goodell. And of course, this doesn’t include the rampant bribery and side payments and perks like cars and prostitutes given to college athletes by boosters that have plagued so many campuses and destroyed a few lives along the way.
3. the NFL damages the handful who do get in. In 2013, 269 of 1700 NFL players were seriously injured,, 28 were arrested, at least 10 charged with serious felonies including murder (10 have been charged with murder since 1998), at least 29 have committed suicide. Of the 79 deceased players , 76 were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy – CTE brain injury. The same scientist studied the brains of 128 football players from high school to NFL and found that 101 of them – 79% - showed signs of CTE. And all of this damage isso the rest of us can have our Sunday afternoons and holidays invaded with violence while we drink cheap beer and eat fat and GMO-laden food and pay Roger Goodell more money than 1000 teachers make in a year.
4. Football upends the finances of hundreds of colleges and universities. The average salary of a college football coach, exclusive of promotion deals, is $1.2 million, with 42 coaches making $2 million or more. Coaches' pay has even outpaced the pay of corporate executives: between 2007 and 2011, CEO pay, including salary, stock, options, bonuses and other pay, rose 23%, according to Equilar, while coaches' pay increased 44%. College Presidents, in contrast, average $400,000 and saw an increase of 2.5% last year (including the $7 million salary of RPI’s president – an outlier). Full-time college professors at four year universities saw a raise of 2.5% to an average of $128,000. Instructors and professors at smaller schools made around $50,000. Is there a reason why the men who train boys to hurt each other for sport are paid up to 10 times as much as the people who train them to use their minds and become part of the workforce?
But the damage does not stop there. In fund raising, college athletic departments can suck the air out of fund raising, a phenomenon I have personally seen. Football is used to cultivate alumni donors, taking the lion’s share of development funds and development staff time. Football apologists say that boosters give more to the schools than others donors, but they fail to mention that sports booster donors frequently earmark their funds for football and other athletics. Worse, the television funds from college football, go largely to ESPN, the NCAA, the Big 5 Conferences, and coaches. None goes to players. Huge amount of campus money and staff time goes into football, football facilities, football games, football parties, taking away those resources from education. The result is that many universities have crowded labs, reduced numbers of TA’s but gold plated training facilities and fields.
5. Football fleeces the poor, robs the middle class and extorts taxpayers.
The NFL is a tax-free non-profit organization – pays no taxes on its $ 9 billion in revenue, (although the teams do pay taxes on their annual average revenue of $6 million.). So we all pay its taxes and we pay for the low-wage NFL stadium employees who use food stamps and sate-run health care or emergency rooms.
Americans shell out $380 billion a year on football and fantasy football gambling, according to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission – an amount equal to 48 times the budget of the EPA and enough money to pay the annual salaries of 7.6 million teachers . Much of that money comes from the poor and middle class. ESPN collect an estimated $5 a month from your cable bill for sports whether or not you want them, effectively stealing $77.88 a year from every viewer that does not watch sports. ESPN collected $7.98 billion in this way in 2014, $1.9 billion of which went to the NFL. Considering that 64% of Americans watch NFL programming, then a third of us are paying for something we don’t want – subsidizing the NFL to the tune of $630,000/year, which is grand theft on a grand scale using your cable bill as a holdup weapon.
And then there are the stadiums. CBS found that of the 20 stadiums built for football teams (19 of which were privately owned) cost a total $525.4 million and that 56% of that money came from public treasuries. That means that the working class taxpayers from cities ranging from San Francisco to Tampa Bay paid $238.1 million to build playgrounds for the wealthiest Americans – money that could have gone to schools or roads or health care or stayed in their pockets.
And it was not a good investment for the taxpayers (it was great for the owners): Almost all of the permanent jobs created were low end and low wage. Much of the benefit of these football palaces is touted as "civic pride" and other unquantifiable measurements. But studies have found that the stadiums that do make a profit do so from events other than games (concerts, etc.), events that could often be produced in other venues in the same city. There is some benefit to the area immediately surrounding the stadium, but little evidence for benefit to the city as a whole, especially if few people come from out of town to attend games.
So, if you are thinking of watching the Super Bowl, you might want to find a demonstration for human rights, or banking regulation or go for a bike ride or hike (or snowshoe if you live in the Est coast). You will be better off and so will the nation. Or you can flame me for being a spoilsport.