Flag Football Gives The NFL A Fresh Set Of Downs To Work With

Football is king of the US professional sports hill these days — sorry baseball and basketball — and the National Football League is showing why with its warm and rather ingenious embrace of a softer, gentler brand of its product, flag football. At a time when concussion and other serious injury concerns are keeping more and more young people from playing full-contact football, youth sports participation and professional sports attendance have been dropping across the board, save in soccer. It seems the millennials and GenZers prefer individual and endurance sports to team sports.

But that hasn’t prevented the NFL from, well, if not exactly reinventing itself, then most certainly expanding its appeal by keeping the game relevant and bringing it to fans in a way they can relate to.

How seriously does the NFL take flag football? Just listen to Troy Vincent, one of the league’s executives, and you’ll get a fair sense. “When we talk about the future of the game of football, it is, no question, flag,” Vincent told The Associated Press. “When I’ve been asked over the last 24 months, in particular, what does the next 100 years look like when you look at football, not professional football, it’s flag. It’s the inclusion and the true motto of ‘football for all.’ There is a place in flag football for all.”

Who among the sports loving and playing public hasn’t enjoyed playing some version of no-contact football as a way of learning the sport? Running the pass routes, dodging your way through would-be “tacklers” or connecting with your teammate down field for a touchdown pass? Football has become so synonymous with bone-crunching contact that it is too easy to forget the sheer athleticism involved in playing the game.

And now many, many more people will get to experience the joy of playing football at a competitive level.

The NFL sponsors a flag football competition of its own featuring some of its former greats, but today there are also some 10,000 girls playing youth flag football, thanks to sponsorships by numerous NFL teams and growing numbers of participating schools. In the ranking of world flag football, the U.S. still sits on top with the largest haul of hardware, but nations including Austria, France, Denmark, Mexico, Germany, Panama and Thailand and Canada are establishing their strong international presences as well.

The NFL partnered with the International Federation of American Football to bring flag football to The World Games and, this summer, flag football will be included as both a women’s and men’s sport in the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama. A place in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles would represent a victory spike of Gronkesque proportions for the NFL and the game(s) of football worldwide.

And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

But greater access is only part of the genius of the NFL’s leadership role in spreading flag football’s popularity. The other side of its genius is the business acumen evident in a league that, despite its continued popularity, is looking ahead to its future by laying the groundwork for continuance. The NFL looked hard at its market – not one year or five years down the road, but 10 or 25 years and counting – and asked where it was heading. And the answer convinced them that the time to innovate was not later, when trends had already limited the options available to the league, but now, when there is time to be innovative and reinvent themselves a bit without completely undermining the brand.

And that is pure genius, much as it was a number of years ago when the NBA, at the height of what many would consider one of its Golden Ages, with Michael Jordan and the Bulls helping to internationalize the game, threw its support behind a fledgling womens professional league, the WNBA. Did doing the right thing figure into that league’s decision to support women’s opportunity to play professional basketball?

Absolutely. But the NBA also knew that more young female basketball players grow up to become supportive female NBA fans as well. And if that meant sharing fans with another league, i.e., the WNBA, well, the competition was well worth the expanded fan base.

The flag football story reminds me of Mark Cuban’s famous 2014 jibe that the NFL was 10 years away from imploding.

“I’m just telling you, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy,” said Cuban, who not coincidently owned (and still owns) the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.

“I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule number one of business.”

Cuban has taken a lot of ribbing for his comment, and justly so. There’s a world of difference between greed and resilience. They may look like the same thing from the outside because both can produce growth and adaptation. But while one may lead to the slaughterhouse, the other just may get you to the medal stand.