TheDOCTORdre
10-03-2006, 04:25 PM
A while back when I was writing for NFL.com -- I learned so much football hanging around NFL guys that now I practically know what I'm talking about -- I asked a Powerful League Insider what was next in football promotion. Without hesitation he answered, "High school." High school football, he explained, was still pure. The pro version of the sport is excellent, but few can empathize with millionaire players and owners who whine nonstop. The college version of the sport just gets better and better, but cynicism just gets worse and worse about football-factory schools where "student"-athletes major in Fitness Center Towel Service Management. By contrast, high school football is untainted. There's almost no money involved. Boys who aren't super-ultra-gifted can play, and girls now sometimes play. Plus far more people experience football either as players or spectators at the high school level than in college or the pros -- it is estimated that about 225 million tickets were sold to high school football games in 2005, versus 17 million tickets for NFL contests. The marketing of high school football, the Powerful League Insider told me, is the next frontier.
Verily, he spoke sooth. Tonight is the debut of NBC's high school football series, "Friday Night Lights," and the initial reviews are glowing. For sheer cinematography, Nike's Briscoe High football commercial is the most impressive advertisement to run on television in years. MTV has a football reality show about Hoover High in Alabama. Sports-equipment manufacturers have begun to sponsor football programs at high-profile high schools; McDonald's recently sponsored a high school football tournament. Enthusiasm for football is soaring even at academic prep schools -- last Friday my teenagers' academics-oriented high school played its homecoming game before a record crowd of 3,000 people. And ESPN is broadcasting a slate of high school football games this fall.
To a point, this is good. High school football is the most human-scale version of the country's most popular sport, and attention ought to be paid. You can attend a high school game without vast expense and hours of traffic jams and logistics. Your friends and neighbors are there. You can cheer for the roughly 1 million boys and 1,000 girls who play high school football each year. I attend far more high school football games than college or pro games, in part because I'd usually rather attend a high school game, whether my kids' team is playing or not. There's something about the dusk sky over a high school football stadium full of kids and their dreams. There's no finer sound than the drums of the marching band echoing off the hill during a high school game. There's a glorious taste of youth and promise to burgers that were grilled by the booster club and have been sitting in the PTA steam tray for hours. And at high school games you don't pay for parking! In terms of offering an accessible sports experience, high school football beats the pros and college handsdown. Plus some of the games are really well played.
Yet shining the promotional spotlight on high school football because it's pure might succeed in ending the purity. Do we really need corporate sponsors muscling into high school sports? Having the local insurance broker or Italian restaurant buy a banner for the stadium is one thing; having multinationals descend is another. Corporate sponsors and ESPN cameras crank up the pressure on kids, adding excitement but subtracting innocence. Their youth and innocence will be gone soon enough. Why speed this up?
National focus on high school football only makes worse the underside of the subject, namely the hurt feelings of those who don't make the team. Playing high school sports is a wonderful experience, bringing satisfaction and instilling in many kids work habits and team awareness that will serve them well later in life. But except at small rural high schools, only a minority can make the prestigious sports rosters. For every player on a high school football team, there are 10 other students who were cut and still haven't gotten over it, or through no fault of their own never had the size or athletic ability to try out in the first place. Millions of high school kids resent the jocks with their embroidered varsity jackets and the cheerleaders with their impressive squad sweaters. Millions receive a subtle and wholly unfair message of inadequacy as the favored of the sports and cheerleading teams glide by in the halls. The more the promotional spotlight shines on high school football, the worse the leftout are likely to feel.
Then there are the skewed priorities brought on by the quest to win. Many high school players are spending far too much time in the weight room as opposed to the library, and are too tempted to use steroids and HGH to get big. Even high school players gaining weight naturally are asking for future medical problems -- the 285-pound offensive lineman, once rare in the NFL, today is common in high school. Parents are pressured to pay for private trainers and even high school combines. As high school sports become win-at-all-costs, priorities go out the window.
School system priorities become skewed, too. In his new book "Air Ball," John Gerdy, a professor at Ohio University, notes one reason so many high schools have shifted to pre-8 a.m. starting bells is to allow plenty of after-school time, before darkness falls, for the football team to practice. Studies consistently show high school boys and girls don't learn well in early-morning classes; learning for the majority, Gerdy contends, is sacrificed to improve practice conditions for sports teams. Budget priorities are skewed. "Air Ball" says that in New Jersey, high schools spend from 60 to 95 percent of their extracurricular-activity budgets on sports, despite only about a quarter of students being on junior varsity or varsity teams. Skewed school priorities might afflict in other ways. Here, Eli Saslow and Josh Barr of the Washington Post detail the case of a Maryland high school football star who was arrested last spring for armed robbery. His principal wanted to expel him; instead the school system moved him to a new high school and cleared him to play football, which he's doing right now. A local judge agreed to postpone his trial until the week after the high school football seasons ends, and gave him permission to leave the state to visit Ohio State, which is said to be recruiting him. Of course, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but the boy in this case had a prior conviction for credit card theft. In the Post article, the boy complained on the record about how the arrest spoiled his summer vacation and said of the armed-robbery charge, "If this drags on … it might mess up getting to [college] and getting started with football." What kind of message do high school systems send when an armed robbery charge means nothing if you're a football star?
At this rate there will soon be an actual high school named after Marlin Briscoe.Now let's contemplate the Briscoe High commercial. It's magnificently done, though TMQ wonders whether it was all filmed, or were the faces of the football celebrities -- Matt Leinart, Troy Polamalu, Don Shula, LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Vick and Brian Urlacher -- digitally inserted? Reader Stephen Peelor of Culver City, Calif., says the backdrops were filmed at Roosevelt High in Los Angeles, an usually large prep school with an enrollment of 5,000. (The fictional Briscoe High's colors are red and white; the real Roosevelt's are red, gold and blue.) The school name is clever and thoughtful. Marlin Briscoe was the first African-American quarterback in the modern NFL, though he ended up spending most of his career at wide receiver, playing for Shula. That's the real Marlin Briscoe standing next to Shula in the pregame speech scene: he's the one with salt-and-pepper hair. The commercial -- watch it here -- is a tremendously made mini-drama, if implausible in football terms (see below).
But what message does Nike's commercial send? The first thing we see is Jimmy Johnson as a high school teacher with Vick, Tomlinson and Urlacher in his class. None of them are paying attention. Johnson as teacher asks Urlacher as student what happened when Napoleon invaded Russia. Urlacher has no idea, and everyone snickers. It's OK to be stupid as long as you're a football star! The implicit anti-education message sent by the Briscoe High commercial has drawn a flood of mail to the Tuesday Morning Quarterback mailbox, including one from Wesley Brown of San Mateo, California, who wrote, "This commercial presents education as a joke and football as all that matters. Nike should not be putting corporate muscle behind mocking education." Does this commercial tell us Nike as a specific company is indifferent to education, or that corporate America is about to ruin high school football by commercializing it? My fear is the latter. The Briscoe High commercial concludes, FOOTBALL IS EVERYTHING. It most assuredly is not! Football is at very best a minor aspect of high school, even for the players. Please, corporate marketers, don't labor to confuse high school educational priorities even more.
Link to Article (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061003&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab3pos1)
Verily, he spoke sooth. Tonight is the debut of NBC's high school football series, "Friday Night Lights," and the initial reviews are glowing. For sheer cinematography, Nike's Briscoe High football commercial is the most impressive advertisement to run on television in years. MTV has a football reality show about Hoover High in Alabama. Sports-equipment manufacturers have begun to sponsor football programs at high-profile high schools; McDonald's recently sponsored a high school football tournament. Enthusiasm for football is soaring even at academic prep schools -- last Friday my teenagers' academics-oriented high school played its homecoming game before a record crowd of 3,000 people. And ESPN is broadcasting a slate of high school football games this fall.
To a point, this is good. High school football is the most human-scale version of the country's most popular sport, and attention ought to be paid. You can attend a high school game without vast expense and hours of traffic jams and logistics. Your friends and neighbors are there. You can cheer for the roughly 1 million boys and 1,000 girls who play high school football each year. I attend far more high school football games than college or pro games, in part because I'd usually rather attend a high school game, whether my kids' team is playing or not. There's something about the dusk sky over a high school football stadium full of kids and their dreams. There's no finer sound than the drums of the marching band echoing off the hill during a high school game. There's a glorious taste of youth and promise to burgers that were grilled by the booster club and have been sitting in the PTA steam tray for hours. And at high school games you don't pay for parking! In terms of offering an accessible sports experience, high school football beats the pros and college handsdown. Plus some of the games are really well played.
Yet shining the promotional spotlight on high school football because it's pure might succeed in ending the purity. Do we really need corporate sponsors muscling into high school sports? Having the local insurance broker or Italian restaurant buy a banner for the stadium is one thing; having multinationals descend is another. Corporate sponsors and ESPN cameras crank up the pressure on kids, adding excitement but subtracting innocence. Their youth and innocence will be gone soon enough. Why speed this up?
National focus on high school football only makes worse the underside of the subject, namely the hurt feelings of those who don't make the team. Playing high school sports is a wonderful experience, bringing satisfaction and instilling in many kids work habits and team awareness that will serve them well later in life. But except at small rural high schools, only a minority can make the prestigious sports rosters. For every player on a high school football team, there are 10 other students who were cut and still haven't gotten over it, or through no fault of their own never had the size or athletic ability to try out in the first place. Millions of high school kids resent the jocks with their embroidered varsity jackets and the cheerleaders with their impressive squad sweaters. Millions receive a subtle and wholly unfair message of inadequacy as the favored of the sports and cheerleading teams glide by in the halls. The more the promotional spotlight shines on high school football, the worse the leftout are likely to feel.
Then there are the skewed priorities brought on by the quest to win. Many high school players are spending far too much time in the weight room as opposed to the library, and are too tempted to use steroids and HGH to get big. Even high school players gaining weight naturally are asking for future medical problems -- the 285-pound offensive lineman, once rare in the NFL, today is common in high school. Parents are pressured to pay for private trainers and even high school combines. As high school sports become win-at-all-costs, priorities go out the window.
School system priorities become skewed, too. In his new book "Air Ball," John Gerdy, a professor at Ohio University, notes one reason so many high schools have shifted to pre-8 a.m. starting bells is to allow plenty of after-school time, before darkness falls, for the football team to practice. Studies consistently show high school boys and girls don't learn well in early-morning classes; learning for the majority, Gerdy contends, is sacrificed to improve practice conditions for sports teams. Budget priorities are skewed. "Air Ball" says that in New Jersey, high schools spend from 60 to 95 percent of their extracurricular-activity budgets on sports, despite only about a quarter of students being on junior varsity or varsity teams. Skewed school priorities might afflict in other ways. Here, Eli Saslow and Josh Barr of the Washington Post detail the case of a Maryland high school football star who was arrested last spring for armed robbery. His principal wanted to expel him; instead the school system moved him to a new high school and cleared him to play football, which he's doing right now. A local judge agreed to postpone his trial until the week after the high school football seasons ends, and gave him permission to leave the state to visit Ohio State, which is said to be recruiting him. Of course, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but the boy in this case had a prior conviction for credit card theft. In the Post article, the boy complained on the record about how the arrest spoiled his summer vacation and said of the armed-robbery charge, "If this drags on … it might mess up getting to [college] and getting started with football." What kind of message do high school systems send when an armed robbery charge means nothing if you're a football star?
At this rate there will soon be an actual high school named after Marlin Briscoe.Now let's contemplate the Briscoe High commercial. It's magnificently done, though TMQ wonders whether it was all filmed, or were the faces of the football celebrities -- Matt Leinart, Troy Polamalu, Don Shula, LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Vick and Brian Urlacher -- digitally inserted? Reader Stephen Peelor of Culver City, Calif., says the backdrops were filmed at Roosevelt High in Los Angeles, an usually large prep school with an enrollment of 5,000. (The fictional Briscoe High's colors are red and white; the real Roosevelt's are red, gold and blue.) The school name is clever and thoughtful. Marlin Briscoe was the first African-American quarterback in the modern NFL, though he ended up spending most of his career at wide receiver, playing for Shula. That's the real Marlin Briscoe standing next to Shula in the pregame speech scene: he's the one with salt-and-pepper hair. The commercial -- watch it here -- is a tremendously made mini-drama, if implausible in football terms (see below).
But what message does Nike's commercial send? The first thing we see is Jimmy Johnson as a high school teacher with Vick, Tomlinson and Urlacher in his class. None of them are paying attention. Johnson as teacher asks Urlacher as student what happened when Napoleon invaded Russia. Urlacher has no idea, and everyone snickers. It's OK to be stupid as long as you're a football star! The implicit anti-education message sent by the Briscoe High commercial has drawn a flood of mail to the Tuesday Morning Quarterback mailbox, including one from Wesley Brown of San Mateo, California, who wrote, "This commercial presents education as a joke and football as all that matters. Nike should not be putting corporate muscle behind mocking education." Does this commercial tell us Nike as a specific company is indifferent to education, or that corporate America is about to ruin high school football by commercializing it? My fear is the latter. The Briscoe High commercial concludes, FOOTBALL IS EVERYTHING. It most assuredly is not! Football is at very best a minor aspect of high school, even for the players. Please, corporate marketers, don't labor to confuse high school educational priorities even more.
Link to Article (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061003&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab3pos1)