NFL and flag football: Why the league has taken interest, invested heavily in it

The quality of the NFL Pro Bowl saw such a decline in competitiveness and contact that it had become practically tackle-free in recent years. Now, it’ll be just that with flag football the new format for the all-star game, with standouts like Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts and Micah Parsons named to teams Wednesday night.

But while player safety, fan grumbling, and trying to avoid putting on a dud show factor into the change, there’s another reason: The NFL increasingly sees flag football as good for business. The league, and its 32 teams, have been investing big-time in the contact-free version of the sport and the Pro Bowl is one way to shed more light on it with the game’s biggest stars. But the real commitment is at the youth level, both at home and abroad, and depending on who you ask, there are a number of reasons for it.

Peyton and Eli going head-to-head as coaches of the Flag football game at the #ProBowlGames!

Who would you rather have as a coach? pic.twitter.com/yiB9VAwFQe

— NFL (@NFL) December 6, 2022

“Flag is played by 20 million people in more than 100 countries,” said Troy Vincent, the former NFL cornerback and the league’s executive vice president of football operations who is spearheading the flag football initiative (according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, 7 million kids 6 and up played flag last year in the US). “This is important to note, this is not just about this investment, the time spent. This is not about being an emerging sport, to participate in the LA 2028 (Summer Olympics) games. This is about changing the way people see and feel about the game of football, and where everyone can experience the values ​​of the game. So this goes far beyond that, this is the future of the sport of football, where everyone can participate and enjoy the values ​​that myself, my colleagues, my children that we learned through the sport.”

Until recently, the flag was largely a sideshow in the long-growing American sports industrial complex: something fondly remembered for summer camps gone by and played in a smattering of youth leagues and schools. There were flag football associations, but the game never competed seriously in participation numbers with its tackle version, not to mention the teeming young hordes who rushed into soccer and baseball for decades.

That narrative is turning, and sharply. Flag since the middle of the 2010s is one of the top-growing youth sports in America, according to the SFIA, and as of 2021, 7 million kids played it. Youth leagues pop up like mushrooms. Some of the surge is attributed to growing parental concerns over brain injuries from playing tackle at a young age. It is also a reflection of the emphasis on girls’ sports as flag is played by both genders.

But the NFL’s role is also critical in understanding the popularity, underscoring pro sports leagues’ efforts to hold onto and create young fans in an era of video games and media fragmentation. More than 1,700 youth flag leagues and teams across the country and Canada are funded in part by America’s top sport, with participation numbers expected to hit 600,000 this year, a nearly doubling of the figure from 2021. It would be as if MLB is suddenly operating a healthy slice of Little League baseball to give a sense of the magnitude of the effort underway.

In fact, the NBA appears to have noticed and launched its own youth league last month in conjunction with the WNBA, while the NHL is funding street hockey teams.

Beyond the investment in youth leagues, the NFL is putting its media apparatus behind the flag with ads promoting the sport, including one possibly during the Super Bowl in February. In addition to transforming the Pro Bowl from tackle into flag football, the league is helping the push to get the tackle-free sport into the 2028 Summer Olympics and is in discussions with the NCAA about making female flag a sanctioned sport.

“We’ve been in constant communication with the NCAA,” Vincent said.

Already, at colleges in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), women’s flag is a sanctioned sport with players receiving scholarships. For the last two years, the Atlanta Falcons hosted a girls’ flag football showcase attended by NAIA recruiters.

“We’ve seen some girls from Georgia who are now playing in college, some on partial scholarships, some just on offers, some on other means of being there,” said Amanda Dinkel, the director of community relations for the Falcons, which funds flag programs in their home state, neighboring Alabama and Montana (team owner Arthur Blank owns a ranch in the state). “But that has been an amazing thing to see girls be able to go play at the next level through one of our showcases.”

The Falcons are leaders in flag among the teams but not alone. Each team has some sort of flag football effort.

So why are the NFL and its teams so invested in the flag? It wasn’t so long ago, in 2014, that the NFL presented a $45 million oversized check to USA Football, the sport’s governing body, to help teach safer tackling techniques. That’s how the NFL then responded to concerns over the safety of the youth game. And while increasing worries about head injuries continue, NFL TV ratings are at record highs by some measures, and college football continues to supply a steady stream of talent to the pros. And there are even two spring leagues, the XFL and USFL, to tap into for players.

Jeff Lewis, who runs the American Flag Football League, which is scheduled to launch next year in five cities as the first pro flag football league, said the answer to the NFL’s flag epiphany is simple: The number of tackle players at the youth level is in decline.

“Clearly, fewer and fewer people are going to want to take the risks associated with playing tackle,” Lewis said. Long-term that could pose an existential threat to football if the number of players thins.

Numbers back up Lewis’ take on youth football. In 2010, 6.8 million kids aged 6 and older played tackle football, compared to a slightly lower number than that for flag, according to SFIA data. By 2015, the year after the NFL’s USA Football check, tackle had declined to 6.2 million, but flag dipped even further to 5.8 million, according to the SFIA. Starting in 2016 as the NFL began ramping up its investments in flag, however, participation rates for the first time exceeded tackle. In 2021 the gap exceeded 1.6 million with more kids playing flag than tackle, according to SFIA.

A seminal moment is fast approaching for the future of tackle football, Lewis predicted: when chronic traumatic encephalopathy is diagnosed in the living. Currently, the brain-wasting disease, first diagnosed in a former NFL player in 2005, is only diagnosable posthumously. Since 2005, more than 320 brains of deceased NFL players studied at Boston University’s CTE Center have been found with the disease, believed to be caused by repeated hits to the head, according to the Concussion Legacy Foundation.

“When that day comes and we see what the percentages of people who are playing in the NFL who already have it, people playing college who already have it, people who are playing other sports like hockey, soccer or other things that have it, it’s going to be a mind blower and it certainly isn’t going to accelerate the number of people who want to play tackle football,” Lewis said.

The NFL has another reason to push the flag: the league’s goal to make football a global game. It is expensive to field a tackle team, among costs such as equipment, officiating and insurance. It is a big hurdle domestically, well enough in countries with no football culture, so how can the NFL hook young people if they are not playing? The answer is a heavy helping of flag programs in international initiatives.

“Japan, where there’s half a million children per age group have a chance to play flag every year, in Mexico 100,000 new flag players in 2021, China 200,000 kids are playing flag football in schools,” Vincent said. The Mexican women’s team upset the US at the Flag Football World Championships in Birmingham this year. And at the 2024 version scheduled in Finland, a record 24 men’s and 24 women’s national teams are expected to compete.

But will flag replace tackle, or merely delay many kids competing in the rougher sport? Signs point to the latter, which suggests the NFL strategy is already working.

Bobby Carpenter, who played football at Ohio State and in the NFL for six years, is a big advocate for flag football, but up to a point. His three kids played flag, but the older two now play tackle. He didn’t play tackle until he was 13.

In Carpenter’s view, flag is one step on the way to tackle, not a replacement. Kids who might otherwise refrain from tackling can get a taste of football and play the sport later in adolescence. He noted that in his kids’ flag league roughly eight out of 10 players move on to the physical version.

In fact, Carpenter said there are risks to flag as kids get older because they run at accelerated speeds in close proximity to each other without any equipment. “Flag to a certain extent can become pretty dangerous,” he said.

There are those of course who believe tackle should be barred at least until high school if not altogether. Chris Nowinski, the CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, emailed, the NFL is investing in flag football because it knows that youth tackle is “not sustainable, especially now that CDC and NIH have both stated that CTE is caused (by) repeated brain injuries … Nothing appears altruistic about this change — they appear to be responding to market changes. When the NFL finally encourages youth parents to choose flag over tackle, then we’ll have something to talk about.”

Asked about the NFL’s position on what age kids should start playing tackle, the league’s Vincent demurred and said the question is best for USA Football, which did not respond for comment. According to USA Football’s “11-player Tackle Implementation Guide,” age requirements are “determined by the local league commissioners and may overlap or differ based on community circumstances (eg, enrollment numbers, access to facilities, number of coaches, etc.). “

The decision ultimately is going to be left to parents and their children barring legislation that would place an age limit on tackle. Chad Rink lives outside the football hotbed of Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, where they have six children. Four of them played flag, and two played tackle, one starting in fourth grade and the other in sixth. However, the duo did not stay with the sport.

Rink conceded he was happy they dropped it.

“With all the studies they’ve done and the stuff they know how concussions work, we’ve just been very happy that neither did,” he said, referring to continuing with the sport. Still, in his area, that is not the norm.

“A lot more kids,” he said, “are probably playing flag earlier and then just waiting until like either middle school or high school to play tackle.”

Beyond whetting the appetite of young players who become eager to play the full game, the promotion of flag football has another benefit, said Dinkel, the Falcons official: making the competitors NFL fans. The Falcons’ efforts are almost all directed at the female flag, and the expectation is not only the competitors, but their children will love and play football, Dinkel said.

“We know that if girls grow and develop within the sport of football, they’ll become fans,” she said. “And they’ll be more comfortable with their kids playing at a later date.”

(Top photo of youth participating in the NFL flag football program on Nov. 11, 2022, in Munich: Gary McCullough / Associated Press)