You know those funny Campbell Soup ads starring NFL players and their mothers? The ones where moms pop up in locker rooms and on fields to bring their sons bowls of steaming Chunky soup?
Those moms have more problems than just keeping their sons fed, now that a 144-page report of an independent investigation has made public the details of the bullying on the Miami Dolphins. It’s nothing that can be fixed by a bowl of soup.
Campbell Soup Co., is one of the NFL’s many corporate sponsors that are bankrolling a league that we now know includes workplace behavior so vile that much of it cannot even be repeated in detail here.
This is what mothers’ sons are facing in the league:
Locker room bullies who wield so much power that even some coaches kowtow to them. Gay jokes. Slavery jokes. Racial insults directed at a player, and ethnic insults, some of them in a mocking Asian accent, aimed at an assistant trainer who was born in Japan. Persistent jokes about gang raping a player’s sister.
Sure, the league will punish those involved in the Dolphins case. That should include Richie Incognito and his henchmen John Jerry and Mike Pouncey at the very least. Even if those players were gone, along with the coaches, who should have known what was going on under their noses, the league’s dysfunctional culture would survive.
The best way to effect real change would be for the league’s corporate sponsors to take a stand. Companies like Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch and Visa hold the only lever that really matters - the purse strings.
The NFL is a $10 billion behemoth, the largest show in U.S. sports. It’s fueled by corporate dollars, and without those steady infusions the engine would stop running. If the big companies stopped advertising, television channels would get spooked and the NFL would be forced to make systemic changes.
In 2013, the NFL and its teams brought in a little more than $1 billion in sponsorship, up 5.7 percent from the previous year, according to a sponsorship report by IEG, a sponsorship research, valuation and consulting company. The sponsors, more than two dozen of them, should recognize they are promoting a workplace in the NFL that instills fear in some of its employees while mortifying others.
Would it be OK if the employees of Microsoft, Papa John’s, Verizon or General Motors - four companies that are “proud sponsors of the NFL” - walked into their workplaces and pretended to have sex with a co-worker? Or used racial slurs, then defended them by saying everyone was in on the jokes? Of course not. But players on the Dolphins felt free to do that, and it’s likely that it wasn’t an isolated case on one team.
Would companies like FedEx, another NFL sponsor, still want to run commercials featuring a young, skinny quarterback who has dreams of being a starter in the league if they knew that quarterback would be bullied to the point that he would consider suicide, as was the case with the Dolphins tackle Jonathan Martin?
So far no company has stepped up to help rid the league of that abusive locker room culture. To do that, those companies have to threaten to pull their sponsorship dollars, but that would take guts and a belief that NFL teams should not be exempt from following common standards.
Does any CEO whose company pours money into the league want to change the league for the better? Or will they continue to turn a blind eye to the sport’s dark underbelly, as they did regarding the concussion problems that led to players’ having brain injuries?
Now the sponsors are faced with another moral dilemma. It should be an easy call, but there is big money at stake, which always complicates things.
Perhaps those companies don’t realize how much power they have to change a workplace that has gone bad. Perhaps they think it’s not their responsibility, but it is.
By paying tens of millions of dollars to the league, they are tacitly condoning the behavior of Incognito. News releases condemning bullying aren’t enough. If they really want to see change in the NFL - and remember, the culture of the NFL shapes team sports from peewee football to the largest college programs - they will demand change. Or else.
They should look to sponsors in cycling for guidance. Real action to clean up the widespread doping there didn’t happen until sponsors started pulling out and television stations, including a state-sponsored station in Germany, refused to broadcast live coverage of the Tour de France.
Roger Goodell should be lauded for commissioning the report that uncovered the embarrassing mess that is now the Dolphins. But he would work much harder to fix the structural problems that created the Dolphins culture if the CEO of Mc-Donald’s called him and said their financial relationship was over.
Procter & Gamble, whose brands include Cover Girl and Tide, could call the league and say it’s out as a sponsor because its marketing goals don’t match with a place where inflatable female dolls are part of the Secret Santa gift exchange.
Perhaps moms, who do most of the shopping for their families, would reach for other brands at the store if they realized those sponsors were complicit in promoting misogyny.
Something drastic needs to be done. And in the world of business, there is nothing more drastic than losing money.
Sports, Pages 22 on 02/16/2014