NFL COO: Needs to Be 'Ordinary' to See Women in Sports Leadership Roles
*By Conor White*
Though last season's 10 percent [drop in ratings](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanberr/2018/08/28/the-nfls-ratings-probably-will-continue-to-decline/#75a6e8dc6666) has stirred questions about the appeal of football broadcasts in the streaming age, the NFL's COO thinks the internet is a useful learning tool for marketing her league.
"What Netflix and Google taught us is that ubiquity and ease are key," the league's chief operating officer Maryann Turcke said in an interview on Cheddar.
"When I think about my own kids, I have a 23-year-old and an 18-year-old; if they can't find something \[quickly\], they're going to stop looking."
Some leagues might be fazed by the rapid rise of eSports, but in certain ways the NFL, which kicks off its season on September 6, has been part of the movement from the beginning ー largely thanks to the success of the Madden franchise of games.
While last weekend's [deadly attack](https://cheddar.com/videos/social-media-livestreams-face-scrutiny-after-jacksonville-shooting) at a qualifying event for the Madden 19 Championship raised concerns over safety at these tournaments, Turcke said the league is poised to take the next step and embrace the eSports craze.
"What Madden did is they brought football into gaming," Turcke said. "I think we need to bring gaming to the broadcast."
"There's a secret sauce out there somewhere, that someone's going to figure out, around how to gamify what we do." she added.
As for the concern about ratings, the NFL's chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp thinks the issue is being exaggerated.
"I think a lot of other people are more worried than we are," he told Cheddar.
While ratings for NFL games are down, [they're also down for everyone else](https://deadspin.com/for-the-last-time-nfl-ratings-are-not-down-theyre-up-1827378925) ー and not just in sports. NBC and CBS both saw viewership fall by 19 percent in 2017, and broadcast networks overall lost 16 percent of their viewers.
"The television industry and media industry is going through some huge changes," Rolapp said. "No one's immune to that."
And live sports ー the NFL, in particular ー are in a better position than most to attract viewers and actually may become more valuable to advertisers in the long run, Rolapp said.
"There is a premium in this marketplace that will continue for any content that can aggregate large number of audiences at one time," Rolapp said. "They are very few, and they are becoming fewer. Live events works, sports works, and the NFL specifically works."
"Whenever you have a product that aggregates audiences, people will find that valuable."
The 2018-19 NFL season officially starts Thursday, when the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles take on the Atlanta Falcons.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/nfl-gears-up-for-another-season).
NFL legend Tom Brady says he is done playing football after 22 seasons. Cheddar News speaks with Trey Wingo, Chief NFL Analyst at Pro Football Network, about Brady announcing his retirement.
Greg Bishop, Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he says Tom Brady's legacy is all about 'progress' and expects the future Hall of Famer to bolster his entrepreneurial ventures following his retirement.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of America has been a driving force for youth mentorship since 1904. The nonprofit organization is launching its annual Big Draft campaign this month in partnership with the NFL, and Artis Stevens, the first Black CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, joined Cheddar to discuss the push for adding more "Bigs" as mentors on his one-year anniversary leading the non-profit organization. "While the NFL is recruiting and drafting more players, they're also helping us to draft more mentors and, particularly, men all the way from across February to all the way to April of this year," Stevens explained.
On this episode of Cheddar Reveals, Jim Riordan, Director of the MBA Sport Management program at Florida Atlantic University, breaks down the successes, failures, and chaos of the first seven months of the Name, Image, Likeness policy in college athletics; Adi Kunalic, President of Opendorse, discusses the first-ever association-wide deal in college athletics between Opendorse and the NAIA, and how Opendorse is marketing and educating student-athletes to make the most of their NIL deal potential; Cheddar gets a look at Curiosity Stream's 'Predicting a Pro'.
Jim Riordan, Director of the MBA Sport Management program at Florida Atlantic University, joins Cheddar Reveals to break down the successes, failures, and chaos of the first seven months of the Name, Image, Likeness policy in college athletics.
Adi Kunalic, President of Opendorse, joins Cheddar Reveals to discuss the first-ever association-wide deal in college athletics between Opendorse and the NAIA, and how Opendorse is marketing and educating student-athletes to make the most of their NIL deal potential.
With the Beijing Winter Olympics set to get underway on Friday, Dan Wolken, a national columnist for USA Today, joined Cheddar News to break down the big storylines as the pandemic and international conflicts threaten to cast a cloud over the event that is aspirationally seen as a beacon of international cooperation. Wolken noted specific issues over cybersecurity for visiting athletes and disputes over human rights leading to a diplomatic boycott have been making waves even before the opening ceremony. "So you've got sort of these barbs going back and forth already between the Americans and the Chinese, and things haven't even started yet," he said. "We don't even know what's going to happen once the games start and people actually start winning medals."
We are a week away from the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and China has already faced a host of problems leading up to the opening ceremony of the Beijing games. DJ Peterson, president of Longview Global Advisors, joins Cheddar News to discuss the many concerns and controversies surrounding the event.
The Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals will be the two teams competing at Super Bowl LVI after both survived their respective nail-biting conference championships. The Big Game will be held at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, home of the Rams, potentially granting them a home-field advantage. Frank Schwab, a sportswriter for Yahoo Sports, joined Cheddar to discuss what bettors should be looking for at this year’s NFL finale. "Super Bowl, unlike any other game on the NFL schedule, where if people bet once a year, it's going to be on the Super Bowl, especially with so many states having legal betting now," Schwab said.
