While the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will go head-to-head this Sunday to secure the Super Bowl LX title, it\u2019s the National Football League (NFL) that will ultimately come out on top, say Brock University researchers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe\u00a0NFL\u2019s \u2018marketing machine\u2019 has been telling compelling narratives of players and franchises across the league all year so that regardless\u00a0of who ultimately wins, there’s going to be a great story attached,\u201d says Assistant Professor of Sport Management Ryan Clutterbuck. \u201cThe NFL\u2019s \u2018secret sauce\u2019 is how it\u00a0capitalizes on those stories and engrains itself into the culture of its fans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of the allure this year lies in the redemption arcs and unexpected rises to the top playing out with athletes and coaches on both teams, Clutterbuck says.<\/p>\n
Even the teams themselves, which last faced off in 2015<\/a><\/u>, had dismal pre-season odds to make it to the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n \u201cSeahawks quarterback Sam\u00a0Darnold\u00a0is now\u00a0a starting quarterback in the Super Bowl after persevering through management decisions that took away his starting position and could have ended his career, and\u00a0Patriots quarterback Drake Maye\u00a0\u2014 in his\u00a0second year in the NFL \u2014\u00a0is an MVP candidate in the biggest game of his career,\u201d Clutterbuck says. \u201cYou also have Patriots Head Coach Mike Vrabel\u2019s triumphant return to the Super Bowl<\/a><\/u>\u00a0to watch, so whichever way the game goes, there’s going to be great images and post-game\u00a0conversation focused on remarkable achievements.\u201d<\/p>\n In off-the-field action,\u00a0the buzz about this year\u2019s halftime show, headlined by Bad Bunny, is exactly the sort of chatter the NFL and its advertisers like to see, says Derek Foster, Associate Professor of Communication, Popular Culture and Film.<\/p>\n Public reaction has ranged from fandom to dismay, but Foster says no one should be surprised by the NFL courting the world\u2019s most popular artist for its biggest game of the year.<\/p>\n \u201cThe NFL is increasingly positioning itself as an international cultural product, playing games in international cities<\/a><\/u>\u00a0to widen the reach of the league,\u201d he says. \u201cAmerican artist Bad Bunny has made it to the top of every country\u2019s Spotify playlist, top in international sales and so forth, so he represents a constituency that the NFL would find very difficult to ignore.\u201d<\/p>\n Foster says that in the interest of spectacular halftime shows, the NFL has taken a much more hands-off approach to programming, instead letting Jay-Z\u2019s Roc Nation select the musical acts since 2019.<\/p>\n He also points to the initial resistance to Taylor Swift\u2019s fandom descending on the NFL and notes that the \u201cexperiment\u201d worked, because supersizing the \u201cspectacle\u201d of the Super Bowl to be more inclusive of a young female audience allowed new fans to connect with the event.<\/p>\n \u201cSome NFL owners reportedly resisted the initial halftime show headliner announcement due to the language divide, because as a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny performs in Spanish,\u201d Foster says. \u201cKnowing the marketplace, they were not going to lose traditional Super Bowl viewers who still want to watch football, but they now have an opportunity to expand viewers worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite successes in cultivating connections with fans and diversifying viewership<\/a><\/u>,\u00a0Clutterbuck says\u00a0the league still has considerable work to do within its own ranks after a \u201cfrustrating hiring cycle in terms of under-representation of minorities in senior leadership roles.\u201d<\/p>\n Notably, only one of the 10 head coaching jobs available this offseason went to a minority candidate<\/a><\/u>, Clutterbuck says, and none went to Black candidates.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a league made up of, depending on the year, between 75 to 80 per cent players of colour, this is another black eye for the league and its leaders,\u201d he says.\u00a0\u201cThe NFL has implemented policies to address some of these challenges, with some success<\/a><\/u>, but this seems like a big step back \u2014 particularly this year in the context of the current political climate and the\u00a0NFL\u2019s previous public efforts to \u2018End Racism<\/a><\/u><\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will go head-to-head this Sunday to secure the Super Bowl LX title, it\u2019s the National Football League (NFL) that will ultimately come out on top, say Brock University researchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107465,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,3319,4767,1,38],"tags":[153,4753,11197,522,3258,7654,8655],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107462"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107462"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107466,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107462\/revisions\/107466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}