Just about every bronze-cast bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame rolled its eyes when, in 2023, a group called The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) issued a positive report card for the NFL, recognizing its commitment to wokeness.
According to ESPN, the league had earned good marks for racial hiring practices (86.2%), gender hiring practices (84%), and “an overall combined grade of B-plus (85.1%).” This was according to the TIDES 2023 NFL Racial and Gender Report Card. Don’t ask me what the TIDES methodology was, or for examples of the sorts of “inroads” the NFL has made. I don’t care, and most likely you don’t, either.
Though, if you really need some examples, the league has made a concerted effort to hire women coaches and referees.
On the coaching side, last year, the league hired six women as coaches, all of them in the strength and conditioning realm. How many of them do you think were hired because they were women? Well, since the NFL is bragging about hiring women as referees and as coaches, it would seem that their gender was a primary reason, wouldn’t it? Perhaps even more so than ability.
If you just go by statistics, given that the country is teeming with very accomplished male strength and conditioning coaches in the pro and college ranks across many sports, the law of averages would indicate that there are likely many men better suited for these jobs than the women the NFL hired. It's just a numbers game. More than likely, the NFL would have had to skip over more qualified male candidates to hire the six women it hired.
If you don’t think the primary motivator for the NFL to hire female coaches was to generate headlines like this, you have another thing coming.
#FlyEaglesFly coach Autumn Lockwood is set to make #SuperBowl history. 🙌 pic.twitter.com/mvopRhlSLv
— Sunday Night Football on NBC (@SNFonNBC) February 1, 2023
The NFL is all about DEI. While its bread and butter is the ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest world of the players, who all have to be men, the league has decided that everything else is subject to experimentation. While players can only play and earn the big bucks if they are good, and they are dropped the second they are of no use to a team, the front office can be packed with people who take up cubicle space and help the league check boxes for the TIDES organization.
To be sure, the league has been careful not to let much of this show. On Sunday, the public mostly sees an over-the-top display of patriotism and a couple of hours of wall-to-wall toxic masculinity. Just what America wants.
In the process, the league makes millions for the teams, the players, the networks, and, most importantly, the sponsors. In fact, you can pretty much assume that the product the NFL puts out is designed at every turn to be a cash-generating machine. In a stadium or on TV on game day, if it moves, someone sponsors it, and the NFL is making money.
In 1984, Lesley Visser of CBS Sports was the first woman to handle the sideline reporting duties for NFL games. Her primary job was to get real-time injury reports during games, but over the years that role has morphed into something else. Network producers, hoping to appeal to the more casual fan, now try to create mid-game narratives or storylines. The sideline reporter, who is now usually a woman, is charged with putting the focus on these storylines throughout the game if she can. Well, that, in addition to asking totally disgruntled head coaches how they feel things are going as they try to escape her for the locker room at halftime.
From a marketing and media perspective, we’ve been told that the primary reason the league wants female sideline reporters is to help grow the female demographic in the fan base. In other words, it's a business decision. There’s no question the female fan base has grown over the years, but I have yet to meet a woman who likes football because she saw a female sideline reporter on TV.
The same is true for those halftime displays of patriotism. The reason you see them is not because Roger Goodell and his staff are model patriots; it’s because they know that their brand is wrapped in the red, white, and blue, literally. It doesn’t hurt that the league has monetized all of that by securing million-dollar sponsorships from the American armed forces and other adjacent organizations like USAA.
Do you really think those camo uniforms, flyovers, honor guards, and soldiers unfurling an American flag on the field all happen because the NFL cares about the country? Consider this: a year ago, because of the government shutdown, the NFL suspended such activities because the Pentagon’s budget was frozen. In other words, when the money ran out, so did the NFL’s demonstrations of patriotism.
The NFL is big business, and you can’t begrudge the owners for being unabashed capitalists. The country does love pro football, and people very willingly and gladly shell out their hard-earned money to enjoy what the NFL is selling. For the most part, it’s a healthy two-way business relationship where both sides feel they're getting value out of it.
But to be clear, in the words of the great Michael Corleone in The Godfather, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
That brings us to a puzzling new addition to the NFL gameday experience, which is the increasing prominence of the gay male cheerleader.
😱 UNBELIEVABLE: The Patriots hired a male cheerleader who’s even more flamboyant and feminine than the women on the squad
— The Rubin Report (@RubinReportShow) September 1, 2026
pic.twitter.com/W22Yv0EsVW
There are the Philadelphia Eagles male cheerleaders. pic.twitter.com/1Wf8bdY5mJ
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) August 31, 2026
I have questions.
I mean, who in the world asked for this? What market research told the NFL that what it really needed to do was complement all that toxic masculinity during the game with this? Seriously, are gay men a viable market for the NFL? How big is that market? Perhaps even more pointedly, as a percentage, how many not just gay men, but flaming gay men, watch the NFL on Sundays? Are we missing something?
As a loyal NFL fan for a very long time, I’ve rarely seen the NFL make the kinds of mistakes it's been making ever since Colin Kaepernick decided to disrespectfully sit out the national anthem in 2016. The NFL did more than tolerate it; it ended up accommodating it as the unpatriotic, ungrateful display spread from team to team.
Ever since, it’s been one steady slide into DEI, wokeness, and more than a few indicators that the league is losing touch with its core fan base. Like many who will read this, I speak from personal experience.
My relationship with the NFL and my favorite team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, fractured on Sept. 25, 2017. As I wrote in February about that Sunday: “Surely my Steelers wouldn’t sit for the anthem, would they? They did something worse. The coach at the time, Mike Tomlin—it was reported then—made the decision to keep the whole team in the locker room so that players who chose to sit during the anthem wouldn’t be called out individually. The empty bench said more, whether Tomlin realized it or not. It came off as a show of unified disrespect for the national anthem.”
I wouldn’t characterize my reaction as a boycott, because that would suggest some personal sacrifice on my part to make a point. That wasn’t it. After that incident, I just couldn’t watch the NFL. Pro football disgusted me. I didn’t sit in my house and watch a game for the next six years. To be honest, I still haven’t been able to enjoy the games as I once did. College football has moved ahead of the NFL for me because it feels like football in a purer form, even though it’s hardly pure.
It doesn’t help that the NFL continues to find ways to alienate me and the millions of others who tune in because all we want to do is watch good football, see a little patriotism, and get a dose of a high-energy, traditional game-day atmosphere, nothing more.
I don’t know what it will take to lose me again, probably for the last time, but one thing I do know: when I took a six-year hiatus from the NFL, I didn’t miss it, and I wasn’t alone. If the NFL loses me another time, most likely, it won’t be because of any single thing. It will likely be the cumulative effect of everything it’s been doing of late. All of it is telling me the NFL no longer wants or needs people like me as fans. I’m cool with that, but if I have one message for the league, it's this: “Be careful what you wish for.”
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