Women’s flag football is likely entering its salad days. Not that tackle football isn’t fully in its prime, contrary to the once popular prediction of its inevitable demise. But now there’s increasing room for those who enjoy the game but are less excited by the potential head trauma. We saw another example of that this week when the NY Jets, who despite their best efforts are still a professional NFL franchise, donated $1 million towards the creation of largest collegiate women's flag football league in the country. Made of universities across the Northeast and slightly beyond, the ECAC will support 7 on 7 women’s flag football beginning in 2027. For full disclosure, I work at Montclair State University, one of the 15 universities who will be a part of the inaugural ECAC – which some of us old timers know as the former power center for Eastern Seaboard Track before the NCAA took over everything.
This is significant for a whole bunch of reasons. And I say that knowing that in the grand landscape of college football, $1 million is not worthy of a rounding error. Alabama spends more than that on a backup kicker. First, it’s another step forward in normalizing this as an NCAA priority. It’s already been identified as an NCAA emerging sport, and there are around 65 teams playing. There’s already a conference – the United East – and the sport is on the docket for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, which in turn supports growth at the college level. Second, involvement by the Jets, and by the default the NFL, both offers the game credibility as well as making clear the League’s interest in both the game and its participants. The NFL takes a lot of heat – often for good reason. But you can never accuse them of ignoring its future business interests. As much as we know the NFL as the home of violent tackle football, they’d like to make sure they’re the home of all football activity in the US – and abroad. It’s hard to know if there’s a viable business model attached to women’s flag football beyond college. But rest assured that if there is, the NFL wants to own it.
On its face, it seems that might be the whole story. The Jets have a business interest, the NCAA wants to maintain gender equity, and this sport seems to be gaining some traction. But underneath the hood, there’s likely a lot more. For starters, it’s worth considering both the progress made in normalizing women playing football at the collegiate level, but also acknowledging that flag football is a deliberate space in the larger contact sports landscape. Where other sports like MMA fighting and hockey have largely the same violent risk for both genders, football has taken a different path. And while yes, women’s tackle football does exist, it's flag football poised both for growth and institutional support. I won’t conjecture whether that’s good or bad – you could argue that everyone should play flag instead of tackle – but rather just that it is. And, I’m guessing, where we find the lion’s share of interest by female athletes.
Second, this is as much a story about universities as it is about sports. The collective landscape of university enrollment and its relationship with corresponding athletics programs is uncertain, to say the least. Several things are true at the same time. One, colleges are struggling to maintain enrollments. Two, more women are attending college than men.
And three, athletics increasingly fails to serve the overall mission of many American universities, especially those beyond the several dozen who thrive in big time football and basketball. So choosing to add women’s flag football – an activity that will likely attract and serve a growing number of college students – while often cutting other sports at the same time – says a whole lot about where higher education is as an industry. And that behind Ohio State and Texas there’s a whole lot of colleges that are looking at reconsidering college sports in a way that reflects their current reality, not one of decades past when the student body looked quite different than it does today. It doesn’t mean that men’s college football is going away. It just means that even those inside that world, like the NJ Jets, realize there’s more out there. And why women’s flag football is entering its salad days.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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