The NFL Won the Culture War

A decade ago, football was dying. What happened?

The NFL’s 2025 image, somehow (Us)

It was 2016, and the National Football League was in trouble.

That fall, Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem for the first time, sparking a wave of (premonitory) conservative backlash against the solidly red-meat institution. Less than a year earlier, NFL games had been interspersed by trailers for “Concussion,” a film about a doctor’s quest to uncover the proliferation of brain damage amongst professional football players, embedded reminders of incidents like former linebacker Junior Seau’s 2012 suicide (Seau shot himself in the chest in order to preserve his brain for testing; subsequent imaging revealed Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [CTE] present on his brain). The year before that, the league’s opening week was spoiled by the release of a video showing star Ravens running back Ray Rice punching, knocking out, and dragging his then-fiancé out of an Atlantic City elevator, the most high-profile incident in a recent string of domestic abuse cases involving NFL players.

Over that mid-2010s period, criticism of the league reached a fever pitch. It seemed obvious, at the time, that the NFL was in decline, a point only accentuated by a previously unimaginable trend: the league’s television ratings were down. This was taken as incontrovertible proof of impending demise. And what a righteous capitulation it would be; the league, after all, deserved what it so clearly had coming. Darth Vader commissioner Roger Goodell had botched the Rice situation about as badly as he could have, and his NFL was being sued by nearly five thousand retired players for its failure to properly protect them on the field. Above all, though, the product Goodell had to work with was violent. And this, simply, wasn’t going to fly. The on-field violence, it seemed, begot the off-field violence, and America was finally rejecting the NFL.

This was the unmistakable tenor of mainstream sports media’s coverage at the time, and the anti-NFL fever caught up with even the most fervently independent of analysts: me. In 2016, I was a freshman in college, writing a weekly sports column for my then-school’s newspaper, and I thought it was pretty clear why the NFL was in decline: all that brutality was catching up to it. In a piece titled “Violent Ends,” I wrote:

Understanding the decline in ratings requires an understanding of the fundamental principle that the game of tackle football is based upon: violence. Brutality has been the common denominator of the game’s evolution from an all-running sport to the eventual introduction of the forward pass through to the modern era.

Dismissing the decline in ratings as a product of short-term, ephemeral issues glosses over the more probable and likely more devastating explanation for the sudden decrease in popularity.”

Time and time again, the NFL has ignored and enabled serious, life-altering damage to both its own players and their families and spouses. And now, the NFL’s chickens are coming home to roost. The league’s seemingly sudden drop in popularity isn’t so sudden at all to those who have been paying attention. It’s simply retribution for years of intolerable incompetence, and fans are finally starting to catch on.

…and in the nine years since, the NFL has continued its precipitous fall into oblivion, talent drained out into safer sports, like basketball, whose meteoric cultural rise contrasts with the league felled so firmly to its knees that it would be unfathomable, unthinkable, unconscionable, that the most famous celebrity in the world would associate herself with a tight end stained by the dark mark of the league, and—sorry, wait. You’re telling me the NFL is…more…popular…than ever?

Yeah. I’d feel worse about my erroneous premonition if I hadn’t merely been riding the coattails of nearly every serious contemporary commentator, all of whom seemed positive that something then was indeed fundamentally rotten with the state of the league. Those pundits, all of them, were wrong. Following a brief dip in ratings, viewership shot back up to normal levels—despite the rise of cord-cutting and the decline of sports ratings generally after the pandemic—where it continues to dominate every most-watched television list in existence. It’s 2025, the Super Bowl is on Sunday, and the NFL is as popular as ever. Why?

It’s multifaceted. The league, by chance, has been blessed with a handful of truly transcendent, mesmerizing quarterbacks capable of performing with levels of athleticism and panache totally novel to the sport. It’s aided those stars with more generous rules both favoring the passing game and erring towards protecting the quarterback, so that games are more aesthetic and, generally, a bit safer. The Kansas City Chiefs, who play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, have emerged as a compelling, household-name dynasty, spawning an all-time great in Patrick Mahomes and a cultural star in Travis Kelce (you may have heard of his girlfriend). Somehow, the NFL, despite having essentially the same racial makeup as the NBA, has avoided many of the cultural pitfalls of the latter; while the NBA took endless shit from conservatives for placing “Black Lives Matter” on its courts at the end of the 2020 season, the NFL has somehow managed to evade similar criticism for its “Inspire Change” campaign, which features (admittedly more anodyne) social justice messaging on helmets and in end zones.

Still, the underlying fundamentals of professional football remain largely unchanged compared to 2016, when it was supposedly in crisis. The NFL can claim whatever safety improvements it wants; it may be true that tackling techniques have improved over the last decade, and that the sorts of all-out, bone crushing hits you might find in a fuzzy, early-2000s YouTube compilation have largely been legislated out of the game. It’s probably safer to be a quarterback today than it was in 1990. But professional football remains an inordinately dangerous game played by some of the fastest men in the world who careen towards each other, helmets down, at ground speeds 99% of humans must enlist wheels to achieve, to take out ankles and knees and shoulders and, often, heads. We have no reason to believe that recent facile changes in gameplay will correlate in any significant way to post-NFL outcomes on player brain damage.

Meanwhile, despite releasing a report last year claiming player arrests had been cut in half since the Rice incident, the league continues to be plagued by an incessant flow of domestic abuse cases, ranging from the bizarre Deshaun Watson allegations a few years ago to the release of a video showing current Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt shoving and kicking a woman outside his home in 2018 (Watson received a contract with the most guaranteed money in NFL history from the Cleveland Browns as his scandal unfolded; the Chiefs cut Hunt upon the video’s release, then re-signed him this season—he’ll be on the field Sunday). And yet. Across nearly every demographic, on TV, on TikTok, on Spotify, the NFL dominates. The violence continues, and the ratings remain as high as ever.

It's tempting to attribute the league’s recent resilience to broader cultural changes, a sporting vibe shift perpetrated by the more masculine-aggressive attitudes which have come to be associated with the young men most likely to impact NFL discourse. It’s true that we’ve witnessed something of a mainstream resurgence of hyper-violent sport in the last year, the product, mostly, of a shift in what’s considered mainstream. In November, Donald Trump received his grandest post-election coronation at Dana White’s UFC 309, at Madison Square Garden, where the President-elect watched Jon “Bones” Jones Jr. (himself the perpetrator of an alleged assault against a woman last year) hit “the YMCA” octagon-side after a roundhouse kick to the ribs crippled his opponent. Clips from Power Slap, the White-owned “American slap fighting promotion company,” (competitors deliver unshielded slaps to opponents’ faces within a 60-second window) regularly pick up hundreds of millions of views. Cruelty is in vogue, and violence is the vibe.

But, other than that mid-2010s dip (which itself never discernibly altered Super Bowl ratings), the NFL has stayed pretty reliably relevant through an untold number of internal scandals and alleged national “vibe shifts” which might have threatened a less secure institution’s place atop the American cultural food chain. Its mainstream popularity is not a product of some recent political trend. The NFL has always been, basically, the UFC hiding behind a slicker veneer, high-stakes, vicious combat fluffed up with the primped-and-primed, boxy jawline of CBS’s ex-quarterback commentator du jour and strategia which Thucydides might find arcane. Its secret sauce has been its ability to somehow funnel what is very clearly a widely shared, quasi-primitive thirst for brutality into a product of respectability; of fancy scoreboard graphics and elaborate halftime shows and A-list glamour.

Here is the crucial point I missed, almost a decade ago, in my haste to bury the league: the relationship between football and violence is symbiotic, not parasitic. For all the 2016 talk about an aversion to brutality, today it appears quite obvious that the resurgence and continued success of the NFL is in fact inextricable from the profound danger inherent in strapping on a helmet. There’s the halftime show and the tradition and Taylor Swift and the pageantry and the theme songs and the giant American Flag and Taylor Swift again and the big, green field which reminds you of how the grass smelled that summer when you finally got your hand under first-crush Sally’s shirt. Football delivers. But so too does, say, baseball, which features basically all the same sentimental hits minus the labyrinthine rulebook and unsavory aftertaste of CTE-induced prison cell hangings. And yet: something like 15 million people, on average, watched the World Series last year. It’s an inexact comparison, but at least 100 million Americans will watch the Super Bowl on Sunday.

We will do so almost entirely devoid of the moral hand-wringing and virtuous brow-furrowing which so dominated the sport’s discourse not so long ago. As much as I’d like to believe that I’m tuning in Sunday to watch Patrick Mahomes fling and Saquon Barkley juke in a vacuum, their performances separated from the 300-pound missiles buzzing, literally, right by their ears, I’m forced to confront the fact that I had absolutely no interest in last weekend’s flag football-style Pro Bowl, despite the big names and star talent participating in it. Plenty of leagues have star power, but none other takes up 72 out of 100 spots on a list of 2024’s most watched television shows. We watch not merely for celebrity but to see man at his limit, going all-out (you do not survive on an NFL field if you’re not going all-out) and risking everything, shielded only by a plastic helmet which doubles as a battering ram. To step onto the gridiron, in 2025, is to willingly accept the unfathomably grim risks accompanied by participation in professional football. It is to be one false step, always, from twitching extremities, a fifth concussion, cardiac arrest. It is to perform on a high wire in front of the world, the reward glory, riches, and a podcast, the risk, quite literally, an early and horrific death.

It is, in other words, unbelievably compelling. That’s an unpalatable admission given the real-life stakes, but I see no stronger explanation for the resiliency, in an otherwise crumbling media landscape, of professional football. In its perfunctory, PR-savvy way, the NFL has halfheartedly addressed the most fervent violence-based critiques which so dogged the league a decade ago. Its shrewdest calculation in the meantime, though, seems to have been its recognition that we, its viewers, don’t really want it to. ■