The job of cheerleaders during a football game is to amp up the crowd in the stadium. It’s in the name. Their job just isn’t necessary for home viewers. And it is arguably less necessary even at the stadiums, given all the multimedia and other stuff they do to hype up the crowd.
I think, @snowthx , your speculation has a lot to do with it. The halftime audience in the stadium doesn’t have first half highlights, highlights from elsewhere in the league, and analysts talking. So the cheerleaders entertain at that time.
I recall being in the studio audience (twice!) for the Johnny Carson show. As a TV viewer, you never really got to hear the band do anything except the opening theme. Why have such a great band headed by a great bandleader if they never play? Well, they did, for the entertainment of the studio audience during the commercial breaks. I’d guess that football cheerleaders perform the same function: entertainment for the stadium audience while the TV audience sees something else.
Seattle’s solution was to rebrand the “Sea Gals” into the “Seahawks Dancers” and have it a mix of men and women.
The Ravens, Titans, and Commanders also have co-ed squads.
This is what the Toronto Raptors did. They danced on a few commercials… But after Covid they no longer show the dancers.
This surprises me; as @Robot_Arm pointed out, ESPN occasionally broadcasts NCAA cheer competitions (and from what I’ve read, competitive cheer has the highest rate of injury of any NCAA sport).There must be some sort of regulatory body, to organize the competitions. Unless they’re purely invitational and independent of each other.
I once worked a retail job with a pair of Atlanta Falcons cheerleaders. (Really nice, down-to-earth young women, by the by.) They told me they didn’t really think of themselves as cheerleaders per se, but as dancers who’d gotten one of the relatively few jobs there are for professional dancers. It was cool to be on the field near the game, but the gig didn’t pay enough to support them outside football season - thus Home Depot.
Re: cheerleaders at female sports - the restaurant where my wife and I ate lunch yesterday was showing an ESPN broadcast of women’s basketball, Florida State vs. Virginia Tech. The game was in Tallahassee, and Florida State’s cheer squad was present.
Scholastic cheerleading (at the high school and college level) is certainly an athletic endeavor, with all of the lifting each other, climbing each other, flips, jumps, and so on. But is that true for cheerleaders for the pro games? From what little I’ve seen of them (because TV has never shown very much of the cheerleaders), their role consists mostly of wearing skimpy costumes, having large breasts, and kicking high enough that you can see their panties. I’ve never seen any of the pro cheerleaders doing the sort of stunts you see from students.
I’m a radio listener of sports so there’s never a mention of sideline cheerleaders that I can recall. But I would’ve assumed that the squad for Dallas would get some airtime, at least shaking their Pom Pom’s.
I used to watch DCC Making the Cut. Kelli and Judy were like den mothers with strict standards for the women trying out.
But being an NFL cheerleader was not always a rosy gig.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/sports/nfl-cheerleaders.html
This seems true. But why is this? You would think that there is apparently ample interest and talent, it would not cost much compared to the expenses of a professional NFL team, it would please fans and impress viewers, it could easily be done in ways that are more classy than exploitative. But maybe it is an archaic thing. It’s not like soccer does not fascinate millions of people, including me.
According to the two Falcons cheerleaders I worked with, NFL cheer squads are more properly what would in high school and college be described as “dance teams” - performing choreographed routines, rather than the tumbling and aerial acrobatics associated with college cheer squads.
And for what it’s worth, neither of them was especially busty - no more than a B cup. Their body types could best be described as “slim and lithe” - more ballerina than pin-up girl.
I don’t see the point in them. People will cheer for their teams whether or not someone is jumping around waiving their pompoms. Seems like a useless occupation unless someone is looking to marry into athlete millions. What, too cynical?
If you’ve ever watched that “Making of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders” show that they used to have on CMT, you’d know it’s absolutely an athletic endeavor, and not an easy one by any stretch of the imagination.
Of course, there’s a whole lot of appearance-related stuff that even female athletes don’t have to put up with, but the dancing part is very difficult looking, both physically and mentally.
The real crime is how low they’re paid. One of my kids actually had a DCC as a preschool teacher, and she was saying that they basically got paid piece-work rates, and tiny amounts at that. It wasn’t a salaried sort of job, or even an hourly wage.
I suspect most of the women who do it do so because it’s a leg up career-wise. I mean, if you’re a pharmaceutical sales rep who used to be a DCC, word will get out, and doctors will want you to visit, as opposed to merely barely tolerate you. Or if they’re into dance, acting, or modeling, there’s a certain cachet that goes with that.
I gather that other teams aren’t so serious about it; some of the other teams’ cheerleading squads seem to have a healthy leavening of strippers among their ranks, alongside the former college cheerleaders, fitness models, etc…
Yep, you got it. No way these women are the top of their craft as dancers and enjoy the performance. Nope, just gold diggers, all of them.
What, too sarcastic?
Not to mention that the NFL has strict rules that cheerleaders are forbidden to have any contact with players. No relationships at all, neither romantic nor platonic.
This here is my thinking too. They do have quick shots of the cheerleaders on TV, but they’re there more to entertain the stadium crowd between plays. The home TV watching crowd gets served as many ads as possible during downtime.
So different than High School! At least back when I went in olden times.
I’m honestly surprised they aren’t just running ads at the games, using the giant screens and stuff. But maybe they actually get that most people would not enjoy that, and that people like to be able to opt out of ads (even if only by muting them).
Didn’t know that. I withdraw my snark.
In my recent experience, at Packer games, they certainly do run video ads on the big screens during TV timeouts / commercial breaks. They likely aren’t the same ads that are being run on the TV network, but they’re definitely ads.
Back to the OP: I do still occasionally see brief shots of the cheerleaders on field during NFL broadcasts, typically when the broadcast is going into, or coming out of, a commercial break.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this is more true for Cowboys games, if only because the Cowboys’ cheerleaders have been very well-known (as a unit) since the 1970s, and are an iconic part of the team’s public image. My recollection is that when the Cowboys’ cheerleaders became popular on the national level, in the mid 1970s, it led most of the other NFL teams to try to tap into that, and launch their own teams of similarly scantily-clad dance-style cheerleaders.
I wonder how much of the difference is due to the size of the venue? At a high school football game, fans can pretty easily be seated within a couple dozen feet of where the cheerleaders are performing, and not much more than that at most colleges. But in an NFL stadium, that distance could easily be hundreds of feet, and cheerleading is a sort of performance that’d be hard to appreciate properly from that sort of distance.
They did. This was unpopular with some of the Dallas bigwigs who described cheerleaders as “porno queens”, which seems unduly harsh and likely untrue. Some teams stopped them because they found them a distraction.
At least on Canadian channels, I think you could infer their existence by the occasional Pom Pom seen over someone’s head. I don’t think they focused on them once. This may or may not be progressive, but it seemed markedly different from how they would have been portrayed a decade prior.
Possibly because of Debbie Does Dallas? The plot of which - such as it was - was Debbie and her friends trying to raise money, via the world’s oldest profession, so that she could go to Dallas to try out as a cheerleader. The Dallas Cowgirls were never named, of course, but that was the implication.
That porn flick must have given the Cowboys management acid reflux.