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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

The NFL’s charitable contributions have sinister truths behind them

Even when it tries to be good, the National Football League is still bad.

The NFL donates millions of dollars each year to youth football programs, like Pop Warner football here in Gainesville, especially in low-income communities. It pays for equipment, uniforms, new fields, etc.

Yet fewer and fewer parents allow their children to play the full-contact sport for an obvious reason: concussions and other injuries. And the NFL, with its significant support of youth football, is contributing heavily to kids sustaining brain injuries.

The amount of boys from upper-middle class families playing football in full pads is decreasing. Studies are showing that CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) can develop in teenage brains, and parents are taking notice. However, kids from low-income households are more than replacing those from the upper-middle class.

In a piece by Bernard Goldberg about this participation trend on HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” the state of Illinois was used as sample to show the participation levels across the country.

The total participation in football among boys in Illinois steadily decreased in the upper-class and middle-class communities from 2012 to 2017. But the state had a 25-percent participation increase among boys from low-income communities in that five-year span.

After requesting information from youth football leagues from across the country, “Real Sports” found that participation is decreasing overall, but rising in households receiving government assistance.

So what does this mean for the NFL? The league is just giving back to underserved communities, right?

The NFL contributing essentials so children can play organized sports seems like the right thing for a money-making powerhouse to do. That is, until you look at the motivation behind it.

The league’s tactic is to get these kids hooked on football and turn them into fans early. Spending money on them now means making more money in the future.

Kids as young as 5 can start playing in full pads in NFL-sponsored leagues. That should make your stomach hurt. Children who hardly possess the skills to read are being put in danger of incurring brain injuries.

Sure, you can blame the parents of these kids for letting them play at such an early age. Some even thrust their child into the sport whether they like it or not. But a surprising amount of low-income families aren’t educated on the topic, and you can’t blame them for that.

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Youth from high annual income families (between $75,000 and $124,999) are about twice as likely to know what to do if they have a suspected concussion compared to youth from lower annual income families (below $35,000) according to a study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. If these kids don’t know, it’s likely their parents are unable to teach them.

We do know the NFL is well-educated on concussions... kind of.

The league and USA Football, youth football’s governing body, sponsor the Heads Up Football program. In 2016, the organizations said that an independent study from 2015 showed that the program reduced injuries by 76 percent and concussions by 30 percent, but the study actually said Heads Up Football had no noticeable effect, as was revealed in an article by the New York Times.

Executive director of USA Football Scott Hallenbeck said,”We regret the error,” to the Times in an email.

So, if the NFL is going to donate millions of dollars to youth football, it should spend more money on educating all communities about the dangers associated with the sport. It should recommend young children don’t play full contact. And it could at least be honest with America when analyzing independent studies about its education programs.

Mark Stine is assistant sports editor at the Alligator. Follow him on Twitter @mstinejr or contact him at mstine@alligator.org.

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