Esprit de Corps

Dear Tiffani,

When do you think professional football teams will start using corporate sponsorship?

Madison Man

Dear Madison,

May I call you Mad? Well, I don’t know if this is something where you want to get in on the action, but you don’t think the whole thing is commercialized enough already? Are you picturing a team coming onto the field in the Oscar Mayer wienermobile? It’s true that football uniforms do not look like Nascar uniforms. Between the car and the driver, they’re lucky to have an unclaimed inch. We usually see those drivers from the chest up, covered with a million logos. If we saw a full-body shot, we might also see strategically placed ads for Dr. Scholl’s, Cialis and Preparation H. The great thing is, they have so many ads visible at once that the eye is overloaded and we don’t see any of them.

But let me point to a few instances where corporate America has ever so subtly infiltrated the game of football. In college football, they managed to jam an ad even on the net that goes up behind the goalposts for the kicks! This missed field goal brought to you by Acme! And then there are the bowl games. Looking at a list of thirty bowl games, I see very few not pimping a sponsor. I think the Rose Bowl made it with its virtue intact, but even the ones we may remember from the old days have become the AT&T Cotton Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl and the Allstate Sugar Bowl. All pretense has been dropped in the Capital One, the Outback, and yes, the Chick-Fil-A Bowl. Imagine the pride of telling your grandkids you played in, say, the Enron Bowl!

So, Mad, in the pros, have you ever noticed Gatorade on the sidelines, or Motorola on a coach’s mike? And the players’ jerseys—hey, what’s that swoosh? And “The Visa Halftime Report, brought to you by Visa.” Who dat? If Visa wants to make a few bucks, we’ll have “The Visa Halftime Report, brought to you by Polident.” And Gillette Stadium, Bank of America Stadium, and—oh brother—Mall of America Field, Qwest Field, Mile High Stadium, no, I mean Invesco Field. The people at Arrowhead Stadium and Lambeau Field are probably shooting themselves for those stupid no-money names.

Of course, Mad, the bottom line is, the NFL and each pro team is, of course, its own corporation, and they don’t want encroachment by others. But maybe there will be teams in extremis where say, the 1-15 St. Louis Rams (or the Lambs, as somebody said), have so many empty seats they’re going broke, and they need to make a deal with the devil. Talks with Dodge fell through when the St. Louis Dodge Ram Toughs identification reflected poorly on the trucks, and “They take a buffeting, and bounce back with Bufferin” seemed too pessimistic. So The Man agrees to come up with the long green if only the team and the fans chant, “USA, USA, USA Today!” or, at each occurrence, “First and ten for CNN!” It’s not that far away.