The Medium is the Message

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen this 30-second NFL commercial broadcast during Bears’ games.  It even has a title, “The Will to Survive,” and features a number of black players, including Dak Prescott and Von Miller.  They’re dressed in animal skins.  Let me repeat that, these African-American player/actors are dressed in animal skins.  And some of them have staffs—thankfully, not spears—in their hands.

They’re traversing a forlorn winter landscape, lacking only a mastodon or two to be complete.  What a great message: The National Football League wants to take you back to the Ice Age, when men were men were hunters and gatherers.  Talk about gearing your message to the man cave.

I also seem to remember an NFL film from the early ’70s that followed coaches on the sidelines.  They all had mics, so you could hear what they were saying to assistants, players and refs.  Hank Stram of the Chiefs was the star of the show, in my humble opinion.  Sharp dresser (I seem to remember he fancied vests) and sharp talker, Stram was the man.  That’s the image I’d be going for.

On a related note, Clare texted me yesterday asking who that “smart NFL player” was, with the degree from a really good school.  She meant John Urschel, who got a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics from Penn State.  The Ravens drafted Urschel, an offensive lineman, in 2014.

The NFL liked the idea of having a player who was working on his Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT, so they did a short film about him; Urschel also did some commercials that played off his nerdiness.  With luck, he banked the residuals, which will come in handy now that he’s retired.  Urschel decided at the start of training camp in 2017 that he liked math more than football.  But that’s not something the NFL wants to publicize to the man-cave crowd.