Been watching Green Bay take Dallas to school, but it could be any televised football game, or other sport. Both teams have cheerleaders, but they have been rarely shown on screen over the last few years. Several commercials (from blue chip companies) highlighted the Toronto Raptors cheerleaders (for example) several years ago. No longer, and the basketball ones also rarely are shown these days.
You might say the idea of cheerleaders is sexist. That women cheering for male athletes is archaic. That cheerleaders were badly treated and grossly underpaid, which was clearly sometimes true and might still be. That this is a good thing.
I disagree. It’s not like they got rid of cheerleaders. It is a surprisingly athletic endeavour. People seem to want to do it. Squads seem to have embraced more diverse phenotypes and feature more male cheerleaders, perhaps mitigating some of those criticisms. Nor does enthusiasm to competitively cheer seem diminished. I can take or leave them, but they can enliven a live event or boring blowout.
It seems to me the compromise of retaining them but rarely showing them or pretending they don’t exist is a little cowardly. Not sure it helps the teams, fans or broadcasters. Not sure it improves morality nor makes one think sports and show business are now fully on board with modern notions of equality (in a time where politicians are often eager to dictate abortion rights). I think showing cheerleaders is entirely harmless, though there seems to be some consensus not to do so.
Soccer never really had them. Women’s sports sometimes have women cheerleaders, though in college basketball they seem highly restrained. That may be pointless, but my point is they kept them, so why not show their athleticism? Or get rid off them. Just seems a weak compromise.
Perhaps. Competitions seem very popular. Soccer games are exciting without the need for cheerleaders.
But it’s not like the Cowboys don’t have a cheering squad. Why is it bad to show them on TV?
If it is for reasons of propriety, fine, but it’s not like they didn’t show Taylor Swift a thousand times during the Chiefs game, which she is attending in a private booth.
There’s no compromise here. They aren’t showing the cheerleaders because they think it would offend people. They aren’t showing cheerleaders because when footballs not happening, then it’s time for ads.
Also, pretty much every Cowboys game has shots of the cheerleaders as they cut to commercial.
Is this really true? Though I could understand it in principle, are the networks actually receiving so many complaints? And in fact, for better or worse, they haven’t shown the cheerleaders when they cut away from the Cowboys game. (And if they did so, would this not equally cause offence?).
Not gonna touch on the sexist part of this.
I was a cheerleader, my girls we’re cheerleaders. It’s quite the athletic sport. You need to know tumbling and acrobatics.
There’s a big football culture here. Highschool level, moves into college level and is even more demanding.
Friday night lights and all.
I imagine pro-level cheerleading is very much different. It’s more of a show biz thing.
Maybe it’s contractual.
We used to employ NFL cheerleaders for our corporate events in the 1990s and early 2000s. We would pay a few thousand for them to basically just come in their uniforms and hang out with our (predominantly male) sales force and customers.
They were paid very, very little at the time. They were NOT paid for practice time which was pretty much a full time job during Aug-Dec/Jan. They were only paid for game days.
Problem was there were thousands queuing up for a few dozen spots. And there was no noticeable difference between the ones on the teams and the ones who’d replace them if they quit.
There was one good thing about the Chiefs during the Lamar Hunt days. No one touched a cheerleader. They sent security to the event to make sure no one got handsy or even vulgar. Our contract allowed them to remove our employees or customers from the facility.
Rankin Smith’s Falcons were a whole lot less classy. Basically they relied on our management to police behavior. With mixed results.
Maybe it’s very different now. But I felt bad for the cheerleaders.
As answer to the OP regarding why teams still have them, cheerleaders are a source of revenue. Not a huge source, but calendar sales and whatnot are good for about a million a year.
I stand corrected. I should have clicked through to the article instead of just taking Google’s word for it, but I’ve always thought the Packers didn’t have cheerleaders so I didn’t bother to read further.
Fun tidbit from that article:
The New York Giants are the only NFL team that never had cheerleaders.
This was always my impression. Pro-level cheerleading is mostly just sexist team marketing. The actual sport occurs mostly only at the collegiate level and below as far as I know (but I admit I know pretty much nothing about it).
I’ve seen cheerleading competitions on ESPN. It obviously takes a lot of athleticism, skill, and practice to do it, but there are a couple things about it that keep me from being more engaged by it.
Like a lot of judged and choreographed sports, it does seem to feature the same moves and styles from all the different teams. I don’t fault them for it at all; the point is to create a routine that will get the highest score, so they’re all probably chasing the same ideal. It just seems like the rules act to stifle creativity in a sport that should be overflowing with it.
The second thing, and I admit that this is me being pedantic, is that it seems weird to be leading cheers when there isn’t some other sport taking place to be leading cheers for. I guess they could be leading cheers for themselves, but that smacks of arrogance. I wonder if you could have cheeerleaders leading cheers for the cheerleaders in the cheerleading competition.
According to federal judge Stefan Underhill, at least for Title IX purposes, cheerleading is not a sport. Underhill specifically stated that the athleticism and skill displayed by those in cheer were not in question, but because there’s no regular season, established rules, or governing body that it wasn’t a sport. I imagine if cheer ever wanted to become a sport it’s going to have to decouple itself from any other sport. And once there’s a regulatory body, I imagine cheer will rapidly change in order to prevent all those catastrophic injuries.
Short speculation: they’re for the halftime entertainment for people at the game.
Longer speculation: At the pro football level I would suspect the cheerleaders have their place at halftime, when they can do their thing on the field. The horror of empty time at a sporting event probably keeps the show going, but as pointed out, unless you are at the game, halftime will be filled with commercials and nonstop jabbering from the analysts, so the at-home audience wont get much exposure to them. The teams without cheerleaders fill the time with other hijinx, like corgi races, altho the 49ers do have cheerleaders, too.
Why are they spelling this? Will this increase meathead comprehension? “Oh! Aggressive!. What a relief. I thought they were telling us to be oppressive. That does not conform to my code of interpersonal management…”
The thing is, jabbering has not much changed over five years. It does not bother me cheerleader exposure has gone from being a few minutes to nothing. But there was never an explanation, and this seems to be a consistent thing. Maybe networks were concerned about abuses, as they are when they cover political events and whatnot.