A hit on Taysom Hill represented a missed opportunity for the broadcast.
Nickelodeon’s broadcast of the Saints’ victory over the Bears in an NFC Wild Card game Sunday quickly took over the Internet, as it was bound to do. Because the Internet is populated by those of us who grew up watching people get slimed on Nickelodeon, and nostalgia is an especially nice thing to indulge in if your other option is watching Mitchell Trubisky.
But the Nickelodeon game was not designed to flatter us olds. (If it was, the team from Hey Dude should have been slugging beers and telling us the real tales of camp while a grown up, disappointed-with-how-it-all-turned-out-but-still-chugging Doug would have been on commentary.) (Yes, he’d still be wearing a green vest over a white short sleeve shirt.) (Legend.)
This broadcast, instead, was designed to get kids interested in football. The data we have — largely participation numbers — suggests that fewer and fewer kids latch onto the game each year, and the NFL and its broadcast partners (Nickelodeon and CBS are owned by the same parent company) are concerned.
But part of the reason fewer kids are playing football is because we’re gaining a better understanding of how dangerous repeated blows to the head can be. There’s a valid reason that families are not signing their 7- or 8-year olds up for tackle football, or for why high school athletes opt for other sports. The apparent decline in interest in football isn’t just a product of divided attention spans or rabble rabble THE KIDS ONLY CARING ABOUT VIDEO GAMES AND SOCIAL MEDIA or whatever cultural force is taking the blame these days.
So when the Nickelodeon game was announced, we were among the outlets that questioned whether such a broadcast might …. uh … elide some of the realities of playing such a brutal sport.
It did:
Now, there was subsequent discussion on Twitter where it was suggest that Nate Burleson — the former NFL receiver who is a rising media star — may not have realized that Hill slammed his head on that particular play. He may have thought it was his knee bothering him.
That’s a potentially fair point; football games happen quickly. But Hill eventually went to the blue tent to be evaluated, and he just had a concussion last week.
A more honest approach from the NFL would have had Burleson prepared in that moment to discuss the importance of being careful with potential brain trauma. That moment could have been use to extol the virtue of NOT just playing through it, but instead being honest with yourself and the person evaluating you when you “get your bell rung.”
There’s been a lot of praise for the Nickelodeon broadcast because it didn’t treat the game so seriously, but … concussions and CTE are serious. There’s no way around that.
There was always going to be something Joe Camel-esque about this broadcast, but the broader point is that football must fully reconcile with its inherent level of violence before carving out a path for sustainability (it’s not like regular announcers are as good on this as they could be).
The game is brutal. Big, tough athletes play it. That’s all part of the appeal. But flipping our reaction from “brush it off and go again” to “if you hit your head, take some time” is absolutely an essential evolution — and if you’re going to be selling the game to kids, that sentiment must be included.
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