Recent Bad Publicity Hasn't Hurt Professional Football

During the past few weeks and months, the National Football League (NFL) has gotten a significant amount of bad publicity. First there were players who were violent to women in their lives. Then came a player who physically abused his 4 year old son so badly with a "switch" that ugly scars were still visible several days later. The NFL was pilloried not only for what those players did, but also for the league's rather tepid reaction to those crimes (and they were crimes).

Then PBS aired a documentary about research that is showing that collisions (a part of the sport) may be causing brain damage in players -- damage that grows even more serious after players grow older and retire. The NFL's only answer to this growing body of research is to deny there is a problem (pointing to a thoroughly inadequate study of their own).

With all the negative publicity the NFL has gotten recently, a reasonable person might think it would have hurt the popularity of professional football -- but he/she would be wrong. The charts in this post were made from information in a new Harris Poll (done between September 10th and 17th of a random national sample of 2,543 adults). It shows that the popularity of professional football has not waned in light of the bad publicity.

Note that the popularity of professional football has actually risen a point over last year (from 54% to 55%) -- and it remains the most popular professional sport in America. And when you break the population down demographically, you find that every group but one has a majority following the sport -- and that one group, women, has 43% still following the sport. It is readily apparent that, while the negative publicity got a lot of headlines and airtime, it has not put even a small dent in the popularity of professional football.