NFL's Nickelodeon play is a messy, savvy strategy with one key goal in mind

The Dallas Cowboys-San Francisco 49ers rivalry is full of iconic moments, from Dwight Clark’s Catch to Terrell Owens stomping on the Texas Stadium star, but it’s safe to say that until the 2021 season playoffs, it had never seen anything quite like this:

Yes, that’s a gargantuan neon-green, 40-foot-tall slime monster rising out of the AT&T Stadium turf. And the players didn’t even react! Now that’s focus.

You know there wasn’t any slime monster on the field. But little kids didn’t, and they were the target audience in that game, one of several that Nickelodeon has simulcast for the NFL. This isn’t your father’s NFL, or even yours.

Yes, the NFL is coming for our children.

The league announced Tuesday morning that Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas will feature a “Slimecast” simulcast on Nickelodeon, a broadcast aimed right at kiddos who have to leave the room when the raunchy halftime show starts. And what do kids like more than anything else? You got it, making messes:

The NFL and Nickelodeon have broadcast three games so far, two during the 2021 season playoffs, and one last Christmas. The broadcasts have drawn anywhere from 900,000 to 2 million viewers — a pittance for an NFL game, but a monumental increase over anything shown on Nickelodeon. But much like the NFL’s Amazon Prime play, present-day numbers aren’t the point; a foundation for future growth is.

In the same way the ESPN ManningCast gave savvy NFL viewers an understanding of, say, what a quarterback is thinking during a two-minute drill or what really happens in the locker room at halftime, the Slimecast educates young viewers on, say, the difference between an extra point and a field goal. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not meant to be.

"The idea was to captivate and cultivate a new fan base, younger people who might not otherwise watch the game,” announcer Noah Eagle said in 2021. “We wanted to explain enough so that those people, those kids watching their first football game, could have at least a general understanding of what was happening."

For the classic, stereotypical NFL television viewer — Midwestern dad, watching the game from an easy chair molded over decades to the precise contours of his butt, snarling at players he’ll never meet, griping everything was better back when Namath/Bradshaw/Aikman/Brady was playing — the Nickelodeon version of the NFL hits like a paint can full of chocolate syrup.

Making football … fun? Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi didn’t sacrifice their lives for this!

With all due respect to the classic stereotypical NFL viewer — who, let’s remember, is the very foundation of this league — what got the NFL to this point won’t carry it any further into the 21st century. The youth of today are the (theoretical) NFL viewers of tomorrow, and the youth of today is in the process of getting its attention spans blown apart like Derrick Henry blasting through a thick fog.

The Slimecasts target Generation Alpha — that’s the incredibly unimaginative name for kids born in 2010 and afterward — so naturally the game appears chaotic, diced into TikTok-friendly moments and borderline unrecognizable to anyone older than 15. (Have you tried to follow a kids game recently? Madness.)

There’s another, subtler strategy at play here, too. Younger generations don’t gravitate toward sports as readily as older ones did. Perhaps they’re spending more time on their phones. Perhaps the vast array of entertainment options crowds out sports. Perhaps, for them, football is as archaic a sport as, say, horse racing.

A 2022 Emory University fandom study found that Gen Z — Americans born between roughly 1995 and 2010 — had a lower rate of sports fans and a higher rate of sports apathetics, than any of the other three generations measured: Boomers, Gen X and Millennials. It’s a wakeup call for anyone assuming sports will be popular decades in the future just because they’re popular now.

Plus, the NFL faces the Mom Challenge. Participation in youth football has declined substantially in recent years, in part because of growing concerns about traumatic brain injury in young players. Among other findings, a 2022 Project Play study noted that tackle football participation for children aged 6 to 12 declined by 29% from 2016-21. For decades, the best way to turn someone into a football fan was to throw them a football; if that’s not an option, what’s next?

Sports leagues can’t just assume that children will grow into fans just because they always have before. Hence, the Slimecast tries to hook 'em when they’re 6 so they’re still watching when they’re 26 … you know, right around the time Patrick Mahomes is going for his 10th ring.