Fun Football Facts I Looked Up While My Kids Watched the NFL Draft
The “fun” is in quotes
I used to be a casual sort of Packers fan, because I’m from the Midwest, but I’ve come to believe the NFL is a horrifying corporation.
So I wasn’t excited that my kids wanted to watch the televised draft. I relented and let them watch half an hour of it (mainly because I couldn’t believe the country is still democratic enough for such a thing to be shown on free network TV, which it was) and I used the time to lodge what I call a “Google search protest.”
I threw lots of search terms that reflect my opinion of the NFL currently into Google, just to see what floated up. Here are the results!
A 2017 study that examined the brains of 202 dead football players (including players from the NFL, the Canadian Football League, and semipro leagues) found “clear evidence” of CTE — a degenerative brain disease — in 177 of them (86.7%).
In 2023, the NFL’s annual revenue exceeded $18 billion dollars. Commissioner Goodell’s goal is for the league to eventually make more than $25 billion dollars.
Taxpayers often fund stadium projects, not owners or teams. According to Steve Almond, in his 2014 book Against Football, when CenturyLink Field was built in Seattle, “seven of every ten…
