by Glenn Stout
The first order of business was the buttering up. Moms were given Atlanta Falcons T-shirts and a bag with the team’s logo on it. They were treated to a dinner catered by Outback Steakhouse and given coupons for the restaurant. As they ate, Freddie Falcon, the Atlanta mascot, buzzed around on a hoverboard posing for pictures.
After that, a group of speakers, including a couple of former players, explained the theory behind Heads Up Football and claimed the sport is now much safer because of it. The presenters offered just enough general health and safety information to be able to argue that the clinics provide a broader service, and just enough talk about concussions so that no one could say the issue was ignored. Former Alabama quarterback John Parker Wilson acknowledged that he had suffered a few head injuries over the years, but he and former Falcons linebacker Buddy Curry told the women that they’d play football over again if they could.
At the end of the clinic, the moms were led outside and put through some Heads Up Football drills. One exercise required them to get into an alert tackling position, knees bent, butt out. “Ohhh, I like it,” one of the coaches said to the group. “Let me see that boom-boom.” Gazzara said that none of the moms seemed to mind; a few even flirted back.
All the parents she spoke with at the clinic said that they left feeling comforted. The event had affirmed their choice to let their kids play football, and they liked all the free gear they could bring home. “They were mostly just excited to be involved with an event put on by an NFL team,” Gazzara said.
It’s clear that these events work brilliantly as promotional devices for the league. But if you judge them by the depth and validity of the information provided to parents, they are shameful. As Anne Osborne, a professor at Syracuse University who cowrote the book Female Fans of the NFL, told me, “The goal of the Moms Clinics isn’t really education. It is indoctrination.”
For one, the league seriously downplays the risk of head injuries. NFL surrogates have become experts in deflecting questions and muddying what we know about brain trauma. Amanda Dinkel, the Falcons’ community relations coordinator, admitted to the group of moms in Birmingham that “concussions are on the rise.” Then she waited a beat: “At least in the media.” (A spokesperson for the Falcons said he spoke to Dinkel and reviewed her notes for the Moms Clinic. “We feel confident that is not exactly what she said,” he told me.) At other Moms Clinics, it’s been said that children are more likely to get a concussion riding a bike than playing football. But that’s only true if you include girls in the data set or limit it to boys under 10. In boys over the age of 10, football is clearly the greater danger.
“Like all contact sports,” a league spokesperson said, “there are risks, and we are committed to ensuring parents and players have the facts and information to make the best decisions for their families.”
The Birmingham clinic also passed without anyone addressing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease found in 90 of 94 NFL players whose brains have been studied after their deaths. “That omission is intentional,” says Chris Nowinski, CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “The NFL focuses on concussions because that seems like a problem that can be solved through initiatives,” like Heads Up Football (which was actually found to have a minimal effect in reducing concussions). “The concern for parents,” Nowinski continued, “should be preventing the numbers of hits to the head their children are taking overall, not just whether or not they get a concussion. You can get CTE without suffering a concussion.”
Nowinski believes that if kids didn’t play tackle football until high school, their chances of developing CTE would be greatly diminished. But that is a damaging proposition from the NFL’s perspective. League research shared with the Wall Street Journal showed that 60 percent of die-hard fans begin following the sport in elementary school, whereas a majority of casual fans find the sport later. “Nothing attaches a young person to a sport more than playing,” says Doug Allen, an original board member of USA Football, the nonprofit the NFL founded in 2002 to promote the sport. If parents took Nowinski’s advice, it would devastate football’s pipeline of players and fans.
Only in March, after years of denial, did the league acknowledge that CTE was linked to football. This new stance, however, hasn’t cracked the messaging at the Moms Clinics. During a break in Birmingham, Gazzara asked Curry about the risks of CTE. “He tried to avoid the question before finally telling me it wasn’t as prevalent as it’s made out to be,” she said. (Curry, when asked for comment, said, “I don’t recall answering the question that way.” He added, “I never answer that question. It’s a science question.”)
At a different clinic in Chicago I attended, a mom asked Nick Greisen, a trainer with USA Football who also played in the NFL, when parents should let their children play tackle football. “A good indicator they might be ready,” he said, is if a child’s neck is strong enough to hold up a helmet.
When I told that story to Nowinski, he remarked that it was a perfect encapsulation of the league’s overall approach. The NFL and the people who profit from it will do whatever it takes to get kids to play football, he said, “science be damned.”
About 40 years ago, a Nobel laureate named Herbert Simon forever altered the study of how people make decisions by popularizing the concept of “bounded rationality.” He argued that since we have limited information, time, and ability to process complex matters, we often default to the option that feels acceptable in the moment over the one that is ideal. “In order to have anything like a complete theory of human rationality,” he wrote, “we have to understand what role emotion plays in it.”
Though that may sound intuitive now, it was a groundbreaking insight at the time. Previously, researchers on decision-making had ignored emotion, treating it as either irrelevant or too unwieldy to take seriously. They were wrong. Emotion is “the dominant driver of most meaningful decisions in life,” according to a 2014 paper, “Emotion and Decision Making,” written by Harvard professor Jennifer S. Lerner and three colleagues.
With that in mind, I joined about 75 parents and their children this April in Chicago’s Grant Park for something called the NFL Draft Family Football Clinic. (Why the league insists on such clunky names for its initiatives should be the subject of another article.) While the rain started to pick up and kids were put through football drills on a nearby field, the parents sat on aluminum bleachers arranged in a half-circle under a strand of leafless trees. They politely listened to a doctor, a trainer, a nutritionist, and a former Chicago Bear run through an agenda similar to the one at Moms Clinics. But they perked up for the real stars of the show: the husband-and-wife team of Mike and Christine Golic.
Mike Golic is an aggressively good-natured former NFL defensive lineman who cohosts ESPN’s Mike & Mike and is one of the network’s most influential voices on radio and television. In Chicago, he assumed the role of celebrity jokester, feigning shock when the nutritionist suggested Doritos were not a good snack. Christine Golic, who goes by Chris, is known mostly for being the embodiment of the football mom fantasy. She has a wealthy and famous husband who played the game and two sons who earned football scholarships to Notre Dame. As a speaker, she isn’t Tony Robbins–style slick, but she has an unassuming, Middle American air, one that easily inspires confidence. She stood in front of the group wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her brown hair tucked under a white NFL Draft hat. Everyone loved her.
When one mother wanted to know if there was a right age for a child to begin playing tackle football, Chris didn’t get into thorny matters of brain science or youth development. She spoke about what she knew. “As a parent,” she said, “you have to take into consideration what your child’s friends are doing, the social aspect. They want to play with their friends.”
I’ve studied Chris’s presentations and interviews from the past few years, and in all of them, she prefaces much of what she says with “as a parent” or “as a mom” and often references her own fam
ily to drive a point home. In Chicago, it created a contrast between her and the other speakers. The trainer, the doctor, the nutritionist—they were professionals offering an opinion. She was a mom, sharing her experiences and feelings.
Near the end of the panel discussion, one mother asked what she should say to people who refuse to let their kids play football. Chris Golic answered first. She talked about how so much of what happens to children in the world is out of their parents’ control. Then she paused meaningfully and said: “I never wanted my kids to not chase their dreams because I was afraid of something.”
Many of the parents in the stands cheered when they heard that. Roger Goodell, who was also in attendance, nodded along. With one sentence she had reframed the choice facing parents. It was no longer: is football safe for kids? It was: are you going to stand in the way of your child achieving his dreams? After the panel ended, some moms greeted Chris Golic with a hug.
In its effort to convince mothers to let their kids play football, the league seems to realize that it’s not enough to manufacture programs and spin narratives that make the sport seem safer. The league has also injected what psychologists call “incidental emotions”—ones you wouldn’t necessarily feel unless prompted—into the calculation. “Parents may already be worried about their child getting a concussion or getting hurt playing football. Those are emotions they are naturally facing with this choice,” says Piercarlo Valdesolo, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College and one of the authors of “Emotion and Decision Making.” “But making parents feel guilty for denying a child an opportunity to play football is framing the choice using an incidental emotion.”
This tactic, most prevalent in politics, aims to reduce a choice down to a gut-level decision. Why? Because “everyone’s gut can be manipulated,” Valdesolo says.
That helps explain the NFL’s recent focus on emotional branding,* particularly to women. Since 2014, the league has executed a “Football Is Family” ad campaign that leans hard on melodrama. Some commercials feature current or former players talking about their childhood and parents. One had a wide receiver sharing what lessons he hopes to teach his son (“The most important thing is not always about what he can do for himself but how he can help other people”); another featured competing grandparents sending Packers and Bears onesies to a newborn.†
There’s also the “Together We Make Football” contest, framed as “an invitation to anyone who has been touched by the game of football” to tell a story of why they love it. The winning entries are turned into polished, sentimental works by NFL Films and are then aired on The Today Show, with its notoriously mom-heavy viewership. One video centers on Felicia Correa-Garcia, a no-nonsense mother of two from Virginia. It shows her teaching the sport to her children and horsing around with them in the backyard before building to the big reveal that she has multiple sclerosis. “Being I’m a single mother of five, and maintaining two jobs, coach sports year-round, it is hard, but, I mean, you only live once,” she says near the end of the short. You’d have to be emotionally vacant not to love Felicia (and football) by the end of it.
Anne Osborne, the Syracuse professor who studied the NFL’s marketing to women, told me that the league enlists its corporate partners to advance similar football-and-family messages. Just think about Kia’s “Built for Football Families” commercials, or Campbell’s Chunky Soup’s “This One’s for Mom” campaign. “That is not coincidental,” she told me. “They work in concert.”
The NFL’s gut strategy is so resonant that even non-affiliated organizations, from the foundation that runs the College Football Hall of Fame to innumerable high school teams and youth leagues, have picked up on it. One of those leagues, St. Raphael Football, based in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, has operated tackle football programs for elementary and middle school kids since 1963. Naperville is the kind of football stronghold that the NFL cannot lose if it wants to survive. In 2007, St. Raphael had 2,500 kids. In 2015, it was 1,500.
After reading about the Moms Clinics, officials at St. Raphael organized their own event at the local VFW hall last year. They served food and wine and handed out hats. The highlight, according to Paul O’Toole, St. Raphael’s president, came when the mother of an alumnus who now plays quarterback for Illinois State stood in front of everyone to talk about how much football had meant to her family—how it brought them closer and instilled values like nothing else in their lives had.
“At one point she unfolded this beautiful quilt, and it had her kid’s high school jersey on it,” O’Toole said. “She was crying up there, and all the moms, 100 moms in the crowd, they were crying too.”
Chris Golic surely understands. When her youngest child went off to Notre Dame in 2012, she found herself with too much free time and in search of something that would “speak to me.” Then the NFL asked her if she’d contribute to the league’s efforts to reshape the game and its image. She now believes that this is her calling in life.
“I felt like I could be this voice to say that, yes, things need to be addressed, absolutely, but also be the person to say that isn’t happening to everybody,” she told me. “There are plenty of people who are playing football, enjoying a football career, and while they are walking away with bumps and bruises and aches and pains like my husband has, they are not suicidal and that kind of thing.”
Osborne says that companies facing scientific proof that a product is dangerous regularly use people like Chris Golic to shift the message. “They focus on the anecdotal,” she told me. “It is like people justifying smoking by saying: ‘My grandpa Joe smoked and he lived to be 92.’ ”
“The NFL puts a family up there that has made it to the pinnacle and says, ‘See, this is what you can be with football,’ ” says Nate Jackson, a former Denver Bronco and the author of Slow Getting Up, a memoir of his playing days. “They hit you with the message that if you want a happy family, you need football.”
What makes Chris Golic so effective is that she doesn’t come across like a salesperson. She truly does not believe that she is doing the league’s bidding. “I’m a mom and your kids are everything to you and I would never want to sell parents something for a company to make money,” she says. She isn’t going to argue with people who say football is unsafe, or who would prefer their children to play other sports. But she will speak—at length and with passion—about her family and her choice to let her kids play.
“If I ever thought there was information out there that was going to change my opinion on what I am talking to moms about, I would for sure reevaluate my position,” she told me.
But that’s not going to happen. We talked all about how harmful football can be. She knows the risks. Chris Golic made her choice and, coincidentally, she made it based on emotion. When I asked her if she understood the criticism that the Moms Clinics were selling a dangerous game to parents, she said people could “spin it that way.” She then added that she knows it’s not true because the people involved in the program have good intentions. How does she know that?
“I call myself the kind of person who follows her gut.”
“The propagandist is knocking at the school door,” the National Education Association warned. The year was 1929, and the group had discovered, to its alarm, that soap manufacturers, banks, insurers, and “electric light companies” were sneaking marketing materials into classrooms. The NEA issued a damning report, but over the next several decades, major corporations continued to barge into America’s schools by creating lesson plans and sponsoring essay contests. As Chevron, the American Coal Foundation, and many others found, few tools inspired lifelong product loyalty quite so effectively.
Today, some of that old propaganda is known by a softer term—“sponsored education materials” or SEMs. With school budgets thin and classrooms overcrowded, SEMs give teachers readymade and vaguely educational lesson plans that just so happen to reinforce how thick Prego spaghetti sauce is or suggest that global warming may be a sham.
The NFL got heavy into SEMs around 2005, partnering with Young Minds Inspired, one of the largest companies in the field, whose other clients include everyone from UNICEF to McDonald’s, Pfizer to Newman’s Own. YMI claims to reach 8 million preschoolers and 28 million elementary school kids each year. And its sales deck promises that its educational materials “break through the clutter of traditional media” and “deliver the message that your company values learning and cares about family.”
The league first worked with YMI on a program designed for fourth- and fifth-graders, called “NFL School Smarts.” Each student was given 28 trading cards, and teachers were sent a list of activities that incorporated them. Some of the exercises had apparent educational value, such as plotting a player’s height and weight on a graph. Others seemed more at home in a casino sports book. For the final activity in the 2006 version of School Smarts, entitled “Game-Day Experiment,” students were required to “come up with individual hypotheses about who will win” an NFL game. Teachers were then told to “have students watch the game at home, with their families, to see if their hypotheses were right!” In other words, the assignment was to pick a winner, and the homework was to sit through three hours of television—not exactly a triumph of the scientific method.
The most recent lesson of School Smarts gave kids some tips for safely browsing the web, such as not giving out their home addresses on unfamiliar websites. At the end of the activity, students were directed to a screen that congratulated them on a job well done, with a cross-promotional cherry on top: “Good call! You know the rules for having fun on the Internet. Now check out the rules for having fun at the NFL RushZone. (We call it NFLRZ for short!)”
Faith Boninger, a research associate at the University of Colorado who coauthors an annual report on schoolhouse commercialization trends for the National Education Policy Center, told me that lesson plans like this essentially turn teachers into salespeople. They have to explain football and its rules to every student—not just the ones who like the sport. “I have seen all of the different ways corporations try to get in front of kids,” she said, “but these sort of SEMs may be the worst.”