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One signal that wokeness is waning: the words printed at the bottom of the helmets of NFL players.
I don't have metrics on this, this is all just my subjective perception. I scrubbed through my recording of the games while writing this in the interest of accuracy.
At the start of the 2020 season, just a few months after social justice become trendy, the NFL decided to allow players to swap out the name of their team on the back of the helmet for a social justice message. At that time they could choose one of four messages: "Stop Hate," "It Takes All Of Us," "End Racism," or "Black Lives Matter." The league would also sometimes print these messages on the field.
At the season opener this past Thursday, with the L.A. Rams facing the Buffalo Bills, I noticed a new message: "Choose Love." I thought it was just nearly all of the Rams sporting this one, but this article says it was all of them. Few of the Bills were displaying anything except for their team name. That the preferred message was so non-specific was a signal itself that attitudes may be shifting. The article says that the NFL says "Choose Love" is a message against hate crimes and gun violence, but I would never have guessed that had it not been spelled out for me.
This past Sunday I watched three games: Cincinnati Bengals vs. Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers vs. Minnesota Vikings, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Dallas Cowboys.
For Bengals vs Steelers I saw zero of these messages. Notably neither quarterback on either team had such a message.
In Packers vs Vikings I couldn't see any messages on the Packers, I'd say about a third of the Vikings had them. Neither quarterback had them.
For Cowboys vs. Bucs I saw none on the Cowboys, about half of Bucs players had them, which included the quarterback Tom Brady, sporting "Inspire Change."
In all of the games I noticed just one "Black Lives Matter," on a Vikings player.
Maybe I'm just misremembering the prevalence of these the past two seasons, but I thought they used to be more likely than not, especially for star players.
The people with their wallets on the line finally got the message that social justice on the field leads to low viewership. Ratings were terrible from 2016-2018 when kneeling was a big issue, rebounded a bit in 2019 when kneeling wasn’t as prominent, dipped back down again in 2020 when kneeling came back (although Covid makes this data point less compelling), then by 2021, when kneeling and social justice had once again faded into the background, ratings were back to their pre-2016 highs. At the time, mainstream outlets attributed the 2016-2018 dip to cordcutters, but cordcutting has continued since 2018 and yet NFL ratings have rebounded.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289979/nfl-number-of-tv-viewers-usa/
Attributing it to cordcutting doesn't make sense anyway. All of the Sunday games are shown on broadcast television, and at that time, about half of the Thursday Night games were. The only games that consistently weren't available over the air were Monday Night games, though MNF's ratings woes since 2016 have mainly been attributed to the network's inability to find an announcing crew anyone likes after Mike Tirico left. MNF and Thursday Night games are also carried locally in the primary markets of the participating teams. That being said, Thursday Night games will be carried exclusively by Amazon (with the local market exception) starting this Thursday, though I doubt this is due as much to cordcutting as it is that the NFL wants to get Amazon to pay them a ton of money while streaming is the hot new thing.
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They lost me, I went from watching about 100 games a year through 2016 to one since (I watched a single game in 2018 hoping they'd turned over a new leaf).
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