Okay, NFL, I get it. The league wants to expand its female audience and is doing so by a pink-saturated breast cancer awareness campaign. Asking the players and coaches to wear a pink wristband? Reasonable. Inundating us with pink wristbands, pink shoes, pink hats, pink team captains’ badges, pick handtowels, and just about everything else? It actually made me want to watch football less yesterday.
Anyone agree or am I alone in this?
Wait until they trot out their new slogan-“Take a Wink at the Pink”
Somebody (Collinsworth, maybe?) mentioned that the pink gloves worn by o-linemen made holds a little more obvious. I wonder if there were more holding calls yesterday than in previous weeks.
Seems to me they should be doing male-oriented “awareness” programs like prostate cancer or something, considering the primary audience and 100% of the participants are men. Let’s face it, if a woman’s not into football, it’s well beyond highly doubtful that this is the thing that’s going to push them into fandom.
And who’s not “aware” of breast cancer nowadays? We’re too aware, even:
Meanwhile, we as a society don’t know shit about skin cancer or oral cancer. We intentionally expose our skin to ionizing radiation and proclaim ourselves as looking “healthy.”
You may be right. This subject came up recently in a discussion I was in, with the general belief expressed that the incidence of breast cancer was by far the highest of any form of the disease. My skepticism as to this point was not well received.
So I looked into this and found that the CDC’s figures for 2006 (apparently the most recent ones currently available) say that the rate for breast cancer was 119.3 per 100,000, whereas prostate cancer was 152.6. Death rates are about equal - prostate cancer just slightly higher.
As for the NFL, I agree with Agent Foxtrot that this is marketing. Advertisers consider women more valuable than men, so adding women viewers can mean serious money.
Seems like it would do more good if they donated all the money they spent on pink gear to actual research. 53 pairs of shoes, jerseys, wristbands, head bands, towels, etc x 32 teams would be a pretty good sized chunk of change…
They auction off the gear to raise money for the American Cancer Society and team charities: here.
And someone proposed that women would be more likely to watch football if the players were pink?
ironically, while pink-clad men are bashing heads, there are WAY more head injuries than cases of breast cancer each year…
Yeah, but think about it this way: most guys like breasts. Saving the ta-tas is a great cause!
I was amused at how the NFL must have gone to great lengths to find just the ride shade that is clearly able to be described as ‘pink’ but is dark enough to be, you know, not too gay.
Any kind of advertising (and that’s what this is) looks like a loss before you start tallying the “business” gained - which is hard to do, especially for folks like us who don’t have access to any real numbers. It’s not always easy even if you do have access to the numbers, because you have to judge success by comparing against some other circumstances that didn’t take place.
Does this whole pinking-of-the-NFL provide a net increase in breast cancer research dollars over what would otherwise have been available? I have no idea. However, this isn’t the first year they’ve done this, so the folks who actually make the decision to do it or not are apparently satisfied with the results. Just what they base this satisfaction on is another thing that I’m just not in a position to know - perhaps I’d agree with their metric, perhaps I wouldn’t.
It depends on how cynical I’m feeling on a given day. I was at the Chargers-Cardinals game on Sunday, and kind of liked the pink skull caps some of the players were wearing under their helmets… 
Any time one particular problem is singled out for attention, some folks will have a problem with it - arguing that this-or-that other problem is more deserving. I dunno; you’ll never get total agreement on where attention is best focused, and I don’t much care for the “other problems are worse, so shut up about this one,” chorus that sometimes seems to scare organizations from doing anything.
Clearly, the NFL’s aims are partly self-serving here; I’m not convinced that this such a dreadful thing, though, if some net good is done along the way. The big question, then, is, “Is it?” Problem is, as I described above, I am not really in a position to say.
Meh. Seems OK to me. Non-issue.
I didn’t even notice. I’m not very observant, though.
Personally, I hate the “pinking” of sports. Watching sports is my escape from the harsh realities of the world, like the fact that my sister has cancer and two aunts died from it. I know that, and I support eradicating cancer, but damnit on Sunday I want to watch football for 3 hours without being reminded about it.
Or leukemia…or lung cancer…or brain cancer…or liver cancer…or malaria…or tuberculosis…or diabetes…or ulcerative colitis…or cardiomyopathy…or antibotic-resistant bacterial infections…you get my gist. So much money that could go into researching these deadly conditions instead goes into breast cancer research.